I killed my television. Please don’t kill me for
saying so. As a repeat offender, I understand that admissions of
this sort tend to get interpreted as boasts akin to “I speak
French.” A reverse snobbery pervades in which stupid looks down on
smart from below. Television, an unparalleled tool of mass
conformity, never threatens individuality as much as when one of
its audience cuts for the exits. So long as television manufactures
normal, killing your television will always appear as the height of
abnormality.
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? “What thrilling
lectures on solar physics will such pictures permit!” declared
scientist Lee de Forest prior to the device’s public availability.
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.
A perusal of the cable listings reveals that the
show starring that unlikely beauty-contest entrant plays today for
eight straight hours on TLC, which is an acronym that once meant
“The Learning Channel.” The looped boredom might work as fare
played on a re-education camp’s closed-circuit screens. But
educational television? A Learning Channel? Orwell laughs. If only
it required barbed wires and guard towers to force people to tune
in to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, my faith in my fellow man
might be reinvigorated. Alas, millions view willingly. Can I secede
from the human race now?
I’m all too human, too. When my satellite receives
transmissions, and my brain doesn’t, television seduces. When I do
TV, I do it dumb. Cage fighting, shows that revel in the pain of
amateur stuntmen, and a certain yellow creature who lives in a
pineapple under the sea make wasting time not such a waste of time.
After a few years of that, I turn off television before it turns
off me. A box that makes imagination obsolete eventually
obliterates imagination.
The remote navigating through hundreds of numbered
stations creates the illusion of infinite choice. But amidst the
many numbers is but one channel. Dial position separates
A&EBravoTLCLifetimeMTVE!VH1. Content doesn’t. 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.
If $16 trillion in debt and state-subsidized
abortion haven’t clued you in to society’s attitude toward
children, the fact that U.S. households now contain more
televisions than kids might. “The average American watches nearly
five hours of video each day, 98 percent of which they watch on a
traditional TV set,” Nielsen gleefully reported last year. The
programming may be at its most primitive. But the technology has
never been so advanced. Porsche, apparently discovering that people
prefer watching to driving, just unveiled a 16-foot television.
This Porsche could be all yours for only $650,000. There is no
substitute—really, there isn’t.
In Fahrenheit 451, a wall TV cost merely
$2,000, a third of Montag’s annual income. Inflation makes even Ray
Bradbury look more Miss Cleo than Nostradamus. The late short-story
writer’s oeuvre, especially the part included on cable’s Ray
Bradbury Theater, reads as a prescient warning against passive
electronic entertainment. 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. The apocalypse referenced in “Almost the End of
the World” (1957) occurs when sunspots blow out broadcast
transmissions, forcing people to arise from the couch to converse,
bowl, drink, eat homemade ice cream, and stage concerts. Even in
the 1950s, when futurists still backwardly dreamt of the medium’s
enormous potential, Bradbury recognized something stupid this way
comes.
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.
