TV Makes You Dumb

I should make it a point to mention to anyone who reads this that I have permanently given up television. It has been a few weeks now and I wasn't sure how long I'd hold up, but let me tell you--I'm done with TV. In my philosophical thinking, I consider myself an idealist with individualist leanings, as you can probably tell--but do not think that I do not think practically. TV was costing me about forty bucks a month, and seeing how I am a poor individualist with a penchant for fine wine and cigarettes--amongst other things, I decided that the most logical action I should take would be to abandon the pleasures of my forty-dollar-a-month television. After all, the only TV station I watched was CSPAN, and one can watch it for free on the internet. Ocasionally I would watch Comedy Central or Cartoon Network, but there are far more interesting and entertaining things to watch on YouTube.

I wonder sometimes if I am alone in my abandonment of television. I find myself out of the loop in school. I've never watched the OC or whatever the new 20-something hit is, but at least I was in the loop on the commercials. The other day in my British literature class, my instructor, whom I highly respect, mentioned something about the previews for a new movie about Queen Elizabeth and I hadn't heard a word about it. Are there others like me who haven't heard of this movie? Everyone in class seemed to know about it. It bothered me for some reason. It seems the only useful purpose I could find in television was it's role it played in informing me of new motion pictures. I hate TV but love movies--weird, I know. There was a time when I was like most of America--intellectually drained by that sucking sound one can almost hear coming from the rectangular idol found in most living rooms across this great nation. I heard Norman Mailer give a speech in which he stated that he believes the reason for the high rate of ADD in the youth, and the overall apathy and ignorance prevalent in America, is due to commercials. Think about it--when you watch whatever it is you watch, you get about ten minutes of dialogue and narrative, and then you are interrupted by something totally irrelevant for five minutes. Your mind gets accustomed to this intake of information in fifteen minute intervals. He said when he was growing up, and even not too long ago, it was not unheard for someone to read two hundred pages of a book in a single sitting. There was no interruption in that intake of information. However, when parent's tell their children to do their homework today, the child may work for ten or fifteen minutes until he or she gets bored and then the parent has to yell at them for five minutes until they go back to the homework. At the time when I heard him say this, I thought it to be somewhat inconsequential, but later on I noticed that the only programs I watched on television were PBS and CSPAN, and what do you know--neither have commercial breaks.

The other reason for giving up on television is the fact that most news programs are designed to be watched by people with a sixth grade education. "Big words" are frowned upon. And besides that, what would be presented in the opinion section of a newspaper is presented to us as the news--objective facts have been sacrificed to the gods of...never mind--the word 'sacrifice' infers that the thing being sacrificed is worth something to the person doing the sacrificing. Bill O'Reilly, who is almost as repulsive to us Irish as Oliver Cromwell, is on primetime--enough said. Loony old Bill's books--and I use that term lightly only in the fact that they are bound pieces of paper-- have about as much thought and intelligence put into them as a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The only problem is that I was raised on Bugs Bunny and I hate to see the nation of fascists who are being raised on Bill O'Reilly. But loony old Bill doesn't write books for people to read. He knows as well as I do that people don't read his books, they just buy them to place them on the shelf next to the picture of his buddy dub-ya. The people who actually read his books (and I'm sure I can name all of them--dub-ya if he could read, that sick-fuck Bill Kristol, the Rockefeller clan, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Gary Bauer, the rapist of liberty Dick Cheney, and the two Eliot's--Cohen and Abrams) are the most disgusting and repulsive members of the human race to have ever existed. It defies me to think that the beauty of childbirth and womanhood could have created these sick individuals. I used to work at a fried chicken drive-in and they remind me of the vat that we used to dump the grease in. They are literally the scum of the earth.

Wasn't I talking about television, nevermind.