Finally! I’m no longer the world’s loneliest among my fellow homo-sapiens. Another voice in my self imposed wilderness cries out! Hark my Brother!!
Okay so you’re asking if I’m off my psych meds at this point and these voices are just a figment of my fevered mind… and the answer there is actually, no I don’t take any and I don’t have any fevers either – but perhaps I should take the drugs….seeing as that also seems to be the prevalent wisdom these days, to spend ones life in a drug induced fog of ” abetter place / better living through chemistry”. Can’t beat – em, might as well join em, eh?
Yeah, Yeah I know get to a point here already – patience grasshopper !! Lest I squash you like the bug you are. Mheh.
Two little letters…..T.V. that’s the subject of this post.
T.V. And why I am dead set against watching it, supporting the advertisers etc.
Those of you old timers around these here parts, I imagine might remember a few rant’s I might have posted about the subject in the past, but now- now I got me an ally…and the keys to the Imperial booze cabinet to boot…I’ve been vindicated!! Or something like that I guess.
Before I get started here is my fellow voice in the wilderness, Daniel Flynn over at American Spectator- go read. Shoot on sight- Your TV is begging for it! Go’wan – I’ll wait.
Back ? Good… so, it seems by his article this poor soul, like me, is liable to look at you in utter confusion if you ask him on Monday morning over coffee what he thought of that latest episode of “Survivor” or “wasn’t that episode of ____ just awesome” (fill in the blank with most popular TV show).
Like that poor soul – I’m at a total loss whenever the subject around the water cooler turns to TV. I simply end up nodding politely and letting my mind wander off into other more interesting things. Like “gee the management needs to do something about that damn air duct up there it’s full of mold”! My eyes will glass over and I loose all interest in the conversation.
I simply do not watch T.V. except on the very rare occasion there is something I really want to see – like my Beloved Steelers smacking around some – oh wait they sucked last year, never mind. That’s a whol ‘nother subject for debate.
Maybe I can thank my parents for not being a TV Junky – course back in the day there wasn’t much to watch – we had three channels and a set of rabbit ears, Mostly Dad watched the news…we didn’t get cable until I was a senior in High School. I held a steady job my entire time in HS, and I was busy – so maybe that had something to do with it as well. I just never developed a real habit for watching the tube.
But what was aired back in the waning years of the industrial age – was vastly different than what is on the Tube now a days. And that content, via my parents, was heavily monitored – and controlled -how controlled you ask? It was a matter of discussion if that cute Gal that played Daisy Duke was dressed too provocatively…if that gives you any ideas of what was deemed as “appropriate”. 2 hours a day max, you might get lucky and get 3 on a weekend night. If you hadn’t screwed up something earlier in the week that is, in my case that was a rare occurrence indeed – problem child that I was. Ahem.
Anyhow, Some of my favorite outtakes of the AmSpec piece are below.
So long as television manufactures normal, killing your television will always appear as the height of abnormality.
Indeed. In fact, I being the bit of a knuckledragging maniac I am, actually take great delight in being ‘abnormal“. Furthermore, I take much amusement in the confused look on people’s face when they ask me if I saw the latest and greatest Idiot Tube offerings of stupid or the latest ‘smash hit from Hollywood’ and I look at them and say dead pan “What’s that?”or “No I don’t watch TV.”
It’s almost comical to see the gears slip and wheels spin looking for traction on an obviously now ice filled road of conversation.That ‘awkward silence’ moment sometimes is just priceless!
Everybody knows the Wright Brothers first flew the airplane, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, and Al Gore invented the Internet. Nobody knows who came up with television. Would you want your name associated with Joanie Loves Chachi, Amish Mafia, or Chris Hansen?
Who the hell is Chris Hansen? Oh well – I’m hoping that the Al Gore quip is satire – but as to the rest of it – Hooah! Really, anymore? I’d like to meet the guy that invented this device- so I could wrap a rusty nail embedded 2×6 across his skull. I know, I know “didn’t you mean 2×4?” No…I meant 2×6 – because given that golden chance? I don’t want to fucking miss.
RCA honcho David Sarnoff foresaw sets unleashing “a new horizon, a new philosophy, a new sense of freedom, and greatest of all, perhaps, a finer and broader understanding between all the peoples of the world.” Three words: Honey Boo Boo.
How fucking glaringly apt that statement is- think about it – a medium that could educate millions – spread information as never before in real time has devolved to such a state that “Honey Boo-Boo” rules the air waves. Millions upon millions watching whatever the fuck a Honey Boo Boo is – I honestly don’t know – if I’ve got my facts right it’s some whiny self indulged fat kid bitching about how fucked up her life is? Her and what’s sure to be a dozen or more copy cat shows about, the-exact-same-stupid-shit. Or hey I know!! Maybe we need just a few more Vampire stories – yeah that’s the fucking ticket…like that one hasn’t been used before.
A horde of hoarders, tattoo artists, and storage-locker vultures passes for someone’s idea of everybody’s idea of entertainment. If you covet other men’s wives, have they got a show, or 10, for you. There’s Basketball Wives, Mob Wives, Army Wives, Sister Wives, Starter Wives Confidential, and at least a half dozen incarnations of the Real Housewives brand. Such a startling dearth of creativity could come only from a generation lulled into retardation by the idiot box.
Simply put – No shit. 15-20 years ago when Hollywood jumped the shark and started remaking every comic book story they could get their hands on I said it – “Those morons are out of ideas”. And they are. And it’s gotten progressively worse since then. The imagination and genius that brought us “Fantasia” and “Gone with the Wind” is dead. It’s successor, a bunch of drug addled fuck- tard rehab failures, that couldn’t have a “creative moment ” if you held a gun to their head. They copy one another endlessly – and then hold circle jerks with catchy names like the Emmy Awards, and in the end, it’s always the same crap sandwich just wrapped in a different shiny wrapper, no meat and lo-fat… of course.
Every fucking scumbag drug polluted sewer rat in the country sporting a tattoo is now an “artist” with a reality TV show. Great. But wait! There’s more! Every deviant psycho with a freaked out compulsion to wallow in their own shit is no longer given a nice extended rest in a place with no sharp objects and finger paints…oh noooooo. Now; They get their own slots on a “reality TV show”….wonderful.
Spread your legs to every miscreant sleaze ball in the hood?? You get a TV show on MTV glamorizing you’re ‘contribution to society’ as an ignorant slut – gee, not so long ago being the local neighborhood cum dumpster had social consequences, not any longer tho ….no, now you “get paid”. Fuck me to tears.
In “The Murderer” (1953), Bradbury casts the tube as a “Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night.” In “The Veldt” (1950), a couple relies on a futuristic television set to raise their brats, only to discover in horrible fashion that their children’s allegiance has shifted to their proxy parent.
And it has – How many little self indulged little brats running around in flash mobs, Occupy Wall Street, Obama cadres, and gangs of marauding punks descending on our cities and towns wrecking terror like a bunch of Jihadis and a no shit biblical plague of locusts – does it actually take to understand this? Do you think kids with parents that give a damn and haven’t utterly abdicated their duties as a parent to the Idiot Box end up like this?
When lil Johnnie goes off the reservation and next thing you know he’s cursing his parents – and ‘society’- for his very being alive and eats a toxic stew of Ecstasy and booze, or blowing his damn head off….It’s like a bad parody. Society is TV – TV is society, so the very thing that Johnnie rails against – was his babysitter. You could cut the irony here with a Ginsu Knife.
Frankly – I’ve got no sympathy anymore I truly don’t. It’s evolution on steroids as far as I am concerned – only the strong survive, the strong being people that are abnormal and refuse to be indoctrinated by this crap or worse, let their children be indoctrinated – Lil Johnnie’s parents weren’t and he suffered- ah, c’est la vie, bon voyage…
Everyone shakes their heads and cries “we just don’t understand” Of course you don’t, you we’re too busy being turned into stone in front of the idiot box and when precious lil Johnnie was being seduced by that same mindless drivel passing for “entertainment” You failed. You failed Utterly and miserably to be a parent. Welcome to the reality show called real life suckers – Cry me a fucking river.
Television appeared to Bradbury as a Medusa. It strikes me as a zombie. You can’t kill what can’t die. I may not be watching. But in the airport waiting area, on the gym treadmill, at the gas pump, on the elevator, in the restaurant bathroom—television watches me. There’s no escape. Mesmerized by television for five hours a day, Americans can’t help but take on the characteristics of the living dead. You are what you view.
True, you can’t kill it but you can refuse it. You can mitigate it by not just watching the damn thing. And I do. But sadly – those same zombies are now making life a living hell for the rest of us. That’s my ire at TV these days. It’s got people so numbed and dumbed and willing to believe any thing, that reality is some sort of abstract concept.
Seriously could anything BUT a zombie really think these people on ‘Survivor’ are living on beans and rice and some fish they caught !??! Did it ever dawn on any of these “Survivor” Junkies what it actually TAKES to do a production like that, the logistics of it? Bah- A little make up and a little smudge here and there and these people are “living off the land and their “wits”…voting people off the island, what hog wash.
Hell – Send me – I’d reckon the ones that get voted off would be the lucky ones – the fuckers left behind in a real world situation would likely starve to death in a week. Or’ I’d have killed them for being stupid – which ever comes first – your mileage may vary. Now that’s what I call Entertainment!
Those same damn zombies – in their abject ignorance and clue bereft TV world – they vote – they vote for more free shit – they vote for life made easy – they vote for Mr. Good Looking in a suit.Because the people on TV told them to.
And because they do? I’m with Daniel – just shoot the damn things. Zombie or TV, it matters not, they are one and the same.