I haven’t watched TV news for several years, or hardly any other TV either. Makes a big difference in your state of mind that you simply cannot imagine until you’re weaned. This isn’t a popular point of view, but so what. The amazing thing, when dipping a toe back into the news for just a sec, is how much like TV magazines like Time and Newsweek are. A bit more depth but hardly. An interesting and depressing test is to see just how many articles in say, Newsweek, are keyed to TV shows or movies. Gag.
Hell, I don’t even listen to NPR very much. Same deal. Pick and choose from the blogs, mostly. Personally, I think the news died because Bush killed satire. It goes beyond that, of course. First the Republithugs killed satire, then reason, then language itself. They might as well be gargling and foaming at the mouth.
We have to retaliate. Fight nonsense with idiocy, then we all jump off a bridge. It’s the only way.
(KIDDING! Get a grip. And blow up your TV.)
P.S. I actually turned on the free cable TV in this place I live and watched 30 minutes of the Sopranos for the first time. Yes, it’s very well done. It also left me feeling like I’d been licking the bathroom floor down at the local tavern. You know what? I understand why a mullah in darkest Pakistan would freak out at having local villagers exposed to Western TV for the first time.
If you watch this gratuitous violence and emotional ugliness all the time, you become desensitized. Get unhooked from TV and movies, wait a couple of years and go back, and it hits you like a jackboot in the solar plexus. We don’t really understand what we’ve been doing to ourselves, folks.
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