Television Pandemic
The sister-in-law won’t get vaccinated. We listen to her, she’s an otherwise intelligent woman who gets her information primarily from the internet, a home-schooled autodidact who’s become a world-class expert on physiology, diet, exercise, the proper raising of children, the separation of church and state. She has an opinion on everything it seems. We listen to her, thinking she’s wrong not to be vaccinated but for at least some of the right reasons—the drug companies are behind the pandemic and are making beaucoup profits; the vaccine will quite possibly disfigure our DNA, making us much less immune from future viruses—and though we disagree with many of her opinions we realize her right to them and respect the fact that she she’s arrived at them from other sources of misinformation and not from television.
I see now that TV lost me when Trump won the presidency in 2016. I still watched TV, but as a mortified ghoul. I preferred not to think of myself as being part of the audience then—as the Nielsen Media Research outfit likes to call it—but as scavenger picking through the garbage network & cable news pundits were tossing out at the time, selling the political mystification caused by the unexpected election of a weirdly-popular television personality as if it was a miracle drug to be taken both as poison and cure. I watched nowhere near the 7 hours and 50 minutes a day Nielsen claims the average American household now watches, but I watched more than I usually watch. I was ‘on the watch’, both coroner and pallbearer of the American experiment that was no longer working, at least for me and the rest of the ‘majority’ who thought they’d voted into office the other candidate. We were all witnessing, as it turns out, perhaps the peak performance of the television age: the delivery of a highly-rated media-star, a man with very little to offer other than his own televised hyperbole, as Chief Executive of the USA.*
The new President watched a lot of TV it’s now reported, (how much tv he watched is a topic safe enough to report now that he’s left office). Trump received much of his information from TV, preferring, it seems, to hear classified information read from a teleprompter by a network anchorperson than to have it whispered in his ear by a member of his gang. The ex-President was literally of the Television Age: a Nielsen graph is available showing Hours of TV American Viewing from 1949-2017, beginning at just under 4 hours in ’49 and climbing to a peak of just over 9 hours per day by ’17. His one successful venture prior to becoming President wasn’t real estate at all; it was the exposure on a television show where he was portrayed as a successful self-made man, so successful he could mouth lofty, though often scripted, pronouncements that actually looked and sounded like reasoned judgements about the contestants on his show from the safety of a TV studio. This, it turns out, would be the big Trump achievement: a TV show that millions of Americans watched, enough of them apparently becoming convinced that his TV persona had the mental and physical wherewithal to lead the nation (where he would lead it is another issue). That he was elected to be President was not his fault, it’s ours; we’ve watched far too much TV and received so little for our watching.
Some causes and effects are difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain. The coronavirus for instance; where did it come from? From China it seems, the other side of the world where the enemy de jour is out-to-get-us, becoming more powerful every day, weakening our national will by exporting disease, while building its own military-industrial complex illegally right under our noses in the South China Sea. And quite possibly from Russia, flooding our information systems with mis-information, outright lies that become believable when passed from what purports to be word-of-mouth from those who know to those want to believe they know. The nation, tv sets on, attuned to Dish Network or Comcast or any number of other cable tv or internet providers, knows the truth, not the history of truth itself, the actual living thing, the passage of time immemorial as recorded in legends, myths, great books, collected and then parsed and re-presented by eminent scholars, but the television truths, the cathode rays of broadcast junk food making a kind of blurry mincemeat of our minds, dull enough by now, as indicated by the Nielsen study of our national TV viewing habits from 1949-2017, to fall for a man as our leader who fell far short of mediocrity, and then to be so grateful he’s gone that we joyfully celebrate the true mediocrity of his successor.
Having just moved for one house to another and having to think through the place I want TV to have in my new life—where to hang the TV sets, how big they’ll be, what ‘provider’ to pick, and so forth. I’ve decided to withdraw from TV, gradually, day by day, so as not to make myself vulnerable to disease. To choose the smallest set, sans cable, and watch whatever I can, but much less of it, turning instead more often to different types of less popular entertainment, the novels of Thomas Bernhard for instance.
*Ronald Reagan was the first normalizer of Television as political launching pad. ‘Death Valley Days’ (49 episodes, 1964-1966) and ‘General Electric Theatre’ (302 episodes, 10 seasons, (1953-1962).