Nearly
twenty-five years ago when my wife and I learned we were about to have (gulp)
twins, we quickly started looking for ways to economize. The list was pretty easily put
together. Fewer of those treasured
evenings at our favorite Greenwich Village restaurant. Longer time between purchases of new
clothing for either of us, and more time at the local thrift shop. We quit food shopping at our favorite shops
and planned meals, shopping at the local grocery store. There were a host of other things we added to
our savings list as time passed. However,
the one “no-brainer” was cancelling cable television. It was clearly a luxury we could walk away
from with little regret. So with one
quick phone call it was done. We cut the
cable. That was in 1994.
In the quarter
century that has passed since we unplugged, we have never re-connected. Occasionally, of course, I would get to
thinking how nice it would be to have all those movies and TV shows at my
fingertips. Then my work would take me
out of town and I would find myself in some hotel with the remote in my eager
hands. “At last,” I would say to myself. “A couple of nights of cable television!” Pointing my device at the television I
would rotate through show after show that I didn’t really care to see. Instead of the paltry four or five channels
of junk I got at home, my hotel television spewed forth over a hundred channels
of junk. It felt like being hip deep in
some ooze that would not easily let me escape.
And with each sojourn to weary
late night hotel rooms with cable, the
question would inevitably come. “Why
would I pay for this?” And so it was that we remained unplugged for
a quarter century.
Flash forward to
the summer of 2018. I went to visit
some friends who have cable television, and have ridden the tumultuous tv wave
through the Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama years and now into the apocalyptic
haze of the Trump regime. They did not, like us, unplug. Sitting at the kitchen table watching the tv
on the wall, my dear friend was mesmerized by the spectacle. Talking about it later, he shared with me how
he simply couldn’t seem to turn it off.
It was, he remarked, “like watching a train wreck in slow motion.” I had
to agree. I couldn’t stop watching
either. It was almost impossible to
ignore the liberal “news” station bleating in a non-stop vituperative wave of
hysteria, all of which was condemnatory,
divisive, and designed carefully to make
the viewer afraid; very afraid. In the interests of full disclosure, I need
to say that I agreed with many, if not most of the views articulated on this
alleged “news” outlet. Yet it wasn’t
concurrence that was my issue. It was
the screechingly panicked tone of it all that caught me. It was as though a button was being pushed
inside me; a button that switched off my
capacity for logic and reason and turned on my reactionary, fearful, panicked
self. Indeed, it caught me so completely that I
found my adrenaline rising to the level of what could only be called a panic
attack. I googled it just to be sure, and indeed I had
all the symptoms. My only choice was to
leave the room as my chest was pounding and I winced at the acrid taste in my
mouth.
Just to be
clear, the equally alleged “news” of the folks at Fox and elsewhere employ exactly
similar ranting, accusatory, divisive rhetorical style. Indeed it could be argued that the right is
better and more adroit at lying than the left, but they have both sunk to
verbal trench warfare without a thought to the unity of nation or culture. The soulless
banlality of evil unfolds, less within the current of ideological rigidity,
though that is certainly the script, but more with the deliberately stimulated
fear that lives in our deeply primal reality.
Our people are kept at constant
levels of fearfulness which renders them powerless. Regardless
of the level of lying, which is admittedly pervasive, all sides of this morass
trade in a constant level of fear mongering that has rendered a whole people
inert as the nation is systematically dismantled. There is a line attributed to Bertolt Brecht
which seems apt here. “Magic fear puts
the world at your command.”
As I went for a
walk to try to detach from my own raw sense of panic it dawned on me that I had
inadvertently missed the bifurcation of
America by not having access to the pervasive and overwhelming presence of
cable television. In my cable-free
quarter of a century, television screens
have becomes ubiquitous. Not only do
85% of American homes pay ridiculous prices for the privilege of being
propagandized and controlled, television
screens are now everywhere. From a day
when there may have been one fuzzy old tv at the end of the local bar, with
denizens catching the football game, there are now usually ten, twenty or more
screens in many bars and restaurants. And
they are loud. They are on buildings
and gas pumps, super market aisles and fast food drive through lanes. Giant
screens are even replacing bill boards along our highways. Big
Brother has arrived, and the results of his presence are not pretty.
During my stroll through the bucolic country-side where my friend lived I continued to process all this. I recalled that some years back, television
networks were required to provide what reasonably passed for journalistic news
as part of the price for using the public airwaves. The
“news” of those days was not permitted to be a profit center for the corporate
giants. They actually had to put in an
effort to tell the truth. Now, were
they always truthful? No. Of course not. But these were the days of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Barbara
Walters, Morey Safer and others. These
were moments when there was an articulated commonly held value in having a well-educated
well-informed public. But sometime during the Reagan years the
powers that be started dealing from the bottom of the deck, and it quietly
became legal for networks to make a profit from television news. Suddenly the “news” was no longer about
providing information. It was about
gathering an audience, and to gather an audience one has to “entertain.” And
nothing, dear friends, entertains like conflict. And in the stormy stew of conflict and the
accompanying paralysis of fear are the rewards of profit profit profit.
And so the
allegedly polarized nation in which we live today is the creation of a
profit-motivated media who has pandered to the fears and insecurities of people
who may have once had liberal or conservative leanings but were still united as
Americans. These
were people who tuned in to actual political debates moderated by the League of
Women Voters. Those have been disposed of quietly. Today, debates are
replaced with hour long mash ups of
sound-bytes and hook lines. You see, the truth of the matter is that our unity is not actually rooted in whether or not we agree on everything. We won’t.
We can’t. We shouldn’t. The wonder of a functioning democracy is
that in our disagreement and engaged conversation, we forge a way forward as a
people. We are not hobbled by
disagreements but, in fact strengthened by them. Even in my baby-boomer days of protest and
anti-war activism, my commitment came through as an American who wanted the
nation to live into its stated values. The same was true of my Republican Uncle, with
whom I would spend hours engaged in discussion and debate. The conversations created depth, closeness
and served to educate us both. More than that, it fostered respect. But today
the shrill invective that plays to our worst inclinations is force fed to us
through a cable tv system that we have been convinced is important enough for
us fork over $100 a month on average.
Friends, we are paying for our own demise as talking heads purse their
lips and point their fingers. We are
writing the checks as our democracy is dismantled in favor of a neo-tribalism.
So the questions
comes. What to do? Are we stuck in this paralysis of fear and
panic? Do we need to watch the train
wreck in slow motion? No, and
no. The first thing that comes to my mind is that we are not powerless. We are never powerless. We do not need to be wallowing in the swamps
of our fear. We do have a choice. If
we disengage from the propaganda whirlwind and shut off the cable tv we will
gradually feel the manipulation of fear subside. As we consciously pursue competent sources of
news that have journalistic integrity we can be informed in the way democratic
people need to be informed. And, as rationality and reason return, we can
claim the reality that our unity is not based in agreement on issues of one
sort or another, but on mutual commitment to and for one another.
I am an unrepentant
fan of singer-songwriter John Prine. And
I close this brief missive with the chorus of a song he wrote called, “Spanish
Pipedream.”
Blow up your TV throw away
your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own
I don’t think
explosives are necessary, but a quick call to your cable company could sever
the collar and leash of media control.
Not only can you cast off the net of manipulation, you could, I’m sure,
find better things to do with the $100 a month that you’re shelling to pay
people to manipulate you.
Wishing everyone
stimulating disagreements and ever closer commitments to mutual care and
compassion.
sr
