28 Days Without Television

I haven’t seen the terrible fires in California or the disturbing news footage about the dwindling water-supply in the western states. I haven’t seen The Men-in-Black Robes at the Supreme Court do their sanctimonious little victory dance(s) over the dismantling of abortion rights AND voting rights. I did not see the US exit from Afghanistan, having no real need to see it, already knowing how it would turn out, having lived through Vietnam, Grenada, the Contra scandal, Iraq…

I’m doing just fine without tv! Withdrawal from television only required what the doctor called minor surgery, an outpatient procedure. I’m finding more and more that what I miss about television is what I never really cared about in the first place—Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the NBA draft, news conferences of politicians, game shows, documentaries of disgraced public figures—and that the less I watch television the longer the list grows.

Not watching tv I’m sleeping more soundly, so soundly that the last 60 or so years of American history are starting to make sense. I’m able to better connect the dots, as pundits are fond of saying, in that dream state between sleep and wakefulness that psycho-therapist’s claim is so productive.

The dots connect just so, transmitted perhaps by semi-conductors housed in tilt-up prefabricated structures installed on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada and Little Rock, Arkansas, right into my sleepy little brain—that the arc of American power and control over its own people looks like this: 1) The establishment of the Imperial Presidency and the complicity of the courts, big business, and corporate media in its establishment 2) the election of Trump, a confectionary media creation whose only claim to political legitimacy was his celebrity, as the crowning achievement of The Imperial Presidency, and 3) Biden’s thoughtful withdrawal the other night from Afghanistan, a war he helped create.

Surely there’s some relationship between the amount of tv consumed every day by the American public and the establishment of the ruling class as embodied in The Imperial Presidency. Duh!

Once you see something you can’t unsee it.