April 22, 2008
TV Makes You Dumb
I originally wrote this article for another blog back in October of 2007.
I should make it a point to mention to anyone who reads this that I have permanently given up television. It has been a few weeks now and I wasn’t sure how long I’d hold up, but let me tell you–I’m done with TV. In my philosophical thinking, I consider myself an idealist with individualist leanings, as you can probably tell–but do not think that I do not think practically. TV was costing me about forty bucks a month, and seeing how I am a poor individualist with a penchant for fine wine and cigarettes–amongst other things, I decided that the most logical action I should take would be to abandon the bourgeois pleasures of my forty-dollar-a-month television. After all, the only TV station I watched was CSPAN, and one can watch it for free on the internet. Ocasionally I would watch Comedy Central, but there are far more interesting and entertaining things to watch on YouTube.
I wonder sometimes if I am alone in my television abandonment. I find myself out of the loop in school. I’ve never watched the OC or whatever the new 20-something hit is, but at least I was in the loop on the commercials. The other day in my British literature class, my instructor mentioned something about the previews for a new movie about Queen Elizabeth and I hadn’t heard a word about it. Are there others like me who haven’t heard of this movie? Everyone in class seemed to know about it. It bothered me for some reason. It seems the only useful purpose I could find in television was it’s role it played in informing me of new motion pictures or the latest innovations in personal grooming. There was a time when I was like most of America–intellectually drained by that sucking sound one can almost hear coming from the rectangular idol found in most living rooms across this great nation. I heard Norman Mailer give a speech in which he stated that he believes the reason for the high rate of ADD in the youth, and the overall apathy and ignorance prevalent in America, is due to commercials. Think about it–when you watch whatever it is you watch, there is about ten minutes of dialogue and narrative, and then there is a frenzied interruption that leads one to think that there has been some kind of super-secret outer space exploit conducted by our marvelous government, only to find out that a new Star Wars video game has been released. Your mind gets accustomed to this intake of information in fifteen minute intervals. He said when he was growing up, and even not too long ago, it was not unheard for someone to read two hundred pages of a book in a single sitting. I can certainly relate to that. There was no interruption in that intake of information. However, when parents tell their children to do their homework today, the child may work for ten or fifteen minutes until he gets bored and then the parent has to yell for five minutes until he goes back to the homework.
The other reason for giving up on television is the fact that most news programs are designed to be watched by people with a sixth grade education. Big words are frowned upon. And besides that, what would be presented in the opinion section of a newspaper is presented to us as the news–objective facts have been sacrificed to the gods of, well, the word ’sacrifice’ infers that the thing being sacrificed is worth something to the person doing the sacrificing. Bill O’Reilly, who is almost as repulsive to us Irish as Oliver Cromwell, is on primetime–enough said. Loony old Bill’s books–and I use the term “books” lightly only in that they are bound pieces of paper– have about as much thought and intelligence put into them as a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The only problem is that I was raised on Bugs Bunny and I hate to see the nation of fascists who are being raised on Bill O’Reilly. But loony old Bill doesn’t write books for people to read. He knows as well as I do that people don’t read his books, they just buy them to place them on the shelf next to the picture of his buddy W. The people who actually read his books (and I’m sure I can name all of them–W, if he could read, that sicko Bill Kristol, the Rockefeller clan, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Gary Bauer, the rapist of liberty Dick Cheney, and the two Eliot’s–Cohen and Abrams) are the most disgusting and repulsive members of the human race to have ever existed. It defies me to think that the beauty of childbirth and womanhood could have created these sick individuals. I used to work at a fried chicken drive-in and they remind me of the vat that we used to dump the grease in. They are literally the scum of the earth.
Wasn’t I talking about television, nevermind.
