I don't know how I got mixed up with these people, these people who insist they don't watch television. I thought I knew my friends fairly well, but a few of them have sprung this on me recently. Suddenly, they seem distant and odd-balled, as if they just divulged that they joined the Church of Scientology or have a fetish for previously worn dress socks.
We're pretty far from Amish country, so I'm not sure what their problem is.
At a recent gathering, my friend Greg announced he and his partner have a small television, but they don't have cable or satellite, like that's something to be proud of. This is akin to owning a refrigerator, but not actually plugging it in. (Granted, a Sub-Zero refrigerator would make a lovely storage closet.) No cable means no Daily Show, and no Daily Show means you're completely out of touch with world events. What are you going to do for news, read the paper? Oh, that's adorable.
Greg went on to deride people who keep their TV on whenever they're home for "background noise." Hey, I am that guy. While the others laughed, I sat silent, not out of embarrassment, but out of pity. The poor dears.
These are kind of people that you need to remember to call if there's ever a major disaster, but then that assumes they have telephones. Maybe all the people who were left in New Orleans after everyone else had evacuated just didn't know what was going on because they don't watch TV. Now I understand the report of people carrying off TV's in the midst of the flooding--if they'd had one in the first place, they'd have known to get out.
All the juicy stuff happens on TV and you never know exactly when. Just last week, Pat Robertson implied that God smote Ariel Sharon, and David Letterman told Bill O'Reilly that 60% of what comes out of his mouth is crap. Nightline's new Koppel-less crew, starring Martin Bashir, failed spectacularly to confirm rumors that 12 coal miners had survived before broadcasting the story across the universe. And on The Today Show, Ann Coulter justified the legality of the president's warrant-free wiretapping by comparing it to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. (See, Mom? Two wrongs do make a right.)
Sure, if you spend 12 hours a day watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air re-runs, you're probably looking in the mirror at an ignorant fatso with pasty skin. But if your 12 hours are spent watching the History Channel, well then, you're looking at a well-informed fatso with pasty skin—one who can kick ass in Jeopardy!.
If you're among those eschewing TV, I guess the rest of us will have to update you. Just in the last 24 hours, here's what you missed. Vice presidential candidate Leo McGarry in a televised debate eerily explained that the first warning sign of heart disease is often death. (Some claim that McGarry and the rest of The West Wing crew are just part of a TV show, but I prefer to believe that Bush and Cheney are fictional and Jed Bartlet is the real president.) American teenager Farris Hassan, who traveled to Iraq without his parents' permission, reported to NBC that he finally left Baghdad only because the media had reported what hotel he was staying in. You also missed two gay teens sweetly kissing right on the lips on Desperate Housewives without any noticeable protest from Donald Wildmon's hopelessly wadded-up underpants.
See? How can you call yourself an informed world citizen if you missed all that?
You choose this for yourself, but don’t impose this deviant lifestyle on the children. A couple I know have an adorable, charming three-year-old who hardly notices the television sitting in the corner of their living room on a shelf, as inanimate as a flower vase. I'm sure his play is as creative as his parents say and he can recite the days of the week, but I worry about a child who will go to Kindergarten without a healthy awareness of the difference between a Wiggle and a Teletubby. How are the other kids going to treat an imaginative boy with an unnaturally long attention span who can't pick Dora the Explorer out of a line-up?
Gather the kids around and watch your TV. It's for your own good. Now, if you'll excuse me, my TiVo has recorded a Will & Grace re-run from 2000.
Tags: television, TV, Desperate Housewives, Farris Hassan, West Wing
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1 comment:
yeah...I struggled with all these issues when my beloved proposed that we not bring a television with us to our new, self-employed lives in Eureka. Mostly it was my addiction to CSPAN and my need to stay culturally relevant (Daily Show, etc.) that worried me. But he won and off we went, sans TV. And yes, we were one of those people who had to get a phone call on 9/11 to know what was happening (although we would have turned on NPR by about 9 am anyway) and I admit to having only the vaguest idea who Jessica and Nick are.
On the other hand--as a self-employed person, I must say that we actually use the time we would have spent watching TV. Life as a freelancer means working until bedtime, not vegging out in front of the TV, but it's a fair tradeoff to be cubicle-free.
Two more observations: (1) being away from TV most of the time and only seeing it now & then in a hotel room makes it obvious how the whole of TV--not just the commercials, but the whole thing--is all about getting people to buy stuff, and also (oddly, confusingly) about keeping people very, very afraid of all kinds of things that are not likely to happen to them, and (
2) the Internet, Netflix, and the coming video on demand revolution will make TV something I can do on my own time and on my own terms--at which point it might be time for us all to kill the television as we know it!
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