Television

After most of a month away, I'm finally back on The Homestead. While there are a lot of things to dislike about other places, one thing that drives me absolutely crazy about traveling is television. In modern America, the television is everywhere. It is in the car, the plane, the airport, the hotel, the restaurant, the classroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, the potty-fer-godsakes. And it is always on. There is nowhere to go, nothing you can do to get away from it. It is just this constant, streaming, penetrating foolishness. Whether it is CNN, ESPN, TNN, or the Food Network the singular fact is that every broadcast is useless garbage. Garbage of the mind and heart.

I do everything I can to try to get away from it. I sit in corners. I sit with my head down and my fingers in my ears. And, still it penetrates. Sometimes, if you're lucky, in some place, you can find the remote unattended and push the mute button. But, it never lasts. Someone always wants to know what the Kardashians are doing today. I try to concentrate. I try to focus. I get my fingers in my ears, my eyes on the page, my head down. I concentrate on what I am reading, on what I am thinking, on what I am writing, but I almost always fail. There will be some shift in the cadence of the presenter as they reiterate that the missing airliner is missing and it will break my train of thought. This is the thing that most irritates me: With the television on there is no space for thinking.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I am not, I could have a field day with this. This is more Orwellian than 1984; it is more coercive than the slogans of Animal Farm. We have achieved world dominance through the stealthy turning of every brain to mush. We have reduced the average attention span to 20 seconds. We have convinced the masses that the words coming from the television are important. This is perfect. No longer will we face the threat of the man who has learned to think for himself.

When I was a kid, people smoked cigarettes where ever and whenever they pleased. In the car, in the plane, in the restaurant, and definitely in the potty. Over the course of my lifetime, however, the dangers of second hand smoke have become so well known that legislatures everywhere have moved to ban indoor smoking. Today it is extremely rare, at least in the United States, to smell cigarette smoke in any public place. But what about second hand TV? Surely the overflow of televised inanity poses a greater threat to human health than cigarette smoke ever did. I mean, smoke might kill you, but television forces you to live forever with a splintered psyche. If you want to smoke in an airport today, you are banished to a small, filthy closet. Why not do the same for television? Anyone who really wants to be bludgeoned by foolishness can go sit in a sound-proofed cave.