There IS Something Wrong with Your Television Set

Resisting the video war

narrative by Glenn Reed

I pause between sets at the gym and I can’t help myself. Like the inadvertent voyeur passing a car wreck, my eyes rise upward to the flickering images from a TV monitor. There, before the thousands thronging at a college football game, a larger-than-life Dubya recites (from a teleprompter) strings of sound bytes scribbled by a well-compensated speech writer.

On CNN, it’s the opening scene for “The Empire Strikes Back,”… I mean “America Strikes Back,” with its moving graphic of the American flag fluttering above ticker-tape news nuggets. On Fox it’s “America’s New War” or “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” but is it Part Seven or Eight? Are they out with the action figures yet or the Northern Alliance Happy Meal?

I hear the dropping of bombs interspersed with chants of “USA! USA!” as masses of cheerleaders seek the scorecard outcome. On the TV monitor, I see faith that all the resolution contained in the digitized, wide-screen paternalistic image can be reduced to black and white. Us or them. With us or against us. Patriot or terrorist

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.”

But you no longer control me.

You did maroon me once. Left me stranded with Gilligan, the Howells and Mary-Anne (always preferable to Ginger), even while my grandmother cajoled me to “go outside and play. How can you stay indoors on this beautiful, summer day?” You compelled me to stare vacantly at people dressed like giant chickens or hot dogs bouncing around like imbeciles as Monty Hall presented them with the moral dilemma of choosing between a new Maytag refrigerator and whatever was inside the giant box.

(Whatever happened to Jay, anyway? He was the real talent in that show!)

You compelled me to continue to next week, stay with you through the commercial break (back when an hour-long program truly had 55 minutes of actual program time!), follow the score on the “Newlywed Game” and guess at the best date for the bachelorette on “The Dating Game.” You glued me to reruns of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Bewitched”and “Lost in Space.”

“Danger, danger, Will Robinson.”

“ There is nothing wrong with your television set.”

We anaesthetize you. We implant the necessary thoughts, opinions, perceptions, emotions. Even when I felt nauseous, spiritually vapid and hung over, violated and empty, I skipped a day at the seashore to see what was behind curtains numbers one, two and three.

Now the curtain rises to reveal a cruise missile soaring upwards—an avenging angel burning the night sky and its exhaust illuminating, by some cosmic coincidence, an American flag. Only now I can flip the switch, jam the remote, yank out the plug, and as the bumper sticker says, “Kill Your Television.”

I can cut the extension cord and turn the “boob tube” into a coffee table. I can tape a picture of a silk-skinned, buxom, blonde, anchor woman to the dead screen, freeze her forever in mid-playful banter, sound byte marketable moment. I can laugh as she fails to deliver the punch line, the consumer tip, the program plug, the ten seconds of news sandwiched between MTV camera play.

And it’s a revelation, a salvation, a breath of fresh air. There’s objectivity and dimension and wonderful complexity. I can now perceive Dan Rather and Wolf Blitzer padding images with words. Salient words. Trigger words. Stimulus-response. Branded emotion. Four or five sentences devoted to a century or a culture. A conflict contained in 30 or 40 words.

I don’t pull out my checkbook in response to the “expert” economist who said “I think back to the Gulf War and how those strikes really boosted the economy.” I don’t ignore the correlations between the stock market and the advance of the Northern Alliance or the firing of 10,000 GM employees or the promotion of their CEO or the Republican plan to lay billions of more dollars on big corporations while hundreds of thousands face unemployment with no benefits.

I don’t look for cool images of dropping bombs, geometric shapes evolving into popcorn/mushroom shapes before the pencil-point jab of “smart” bombs. I don’t settle for reruns or the return of the western.

Because you longer control me.

The rain falls lightly and the low clouds are visible swirling in the vague light of early evening. The wet landscape offers scents of fallen leaves and tilled earth as I run past the scattered farms and homes of this back road. Aside from the occasional passing car there’s no other human presence except that implied by the blue-tinted glows emanating from almost every window of every house that I pass. I imagine moths drawn to the staccato flashes, the flicker of an image every five seconds, every two seconds, every second. There are seconds within seconds. There is movement within each movement. There is no waiting, no analysis, no present. Just process. Just stimulus-response. Just mouths foaming at the prospect of Big Macs or cell phones or Ford Excursions belching noxious clouds on the way to Wal-Mart. Just saliva dripping at the hope of John Wayne or Dubya shooting the bad guy. On sale and pocket-sized and fitting in the palm of your hand or nestled in your ear or impaled in the consumer morass of your soul.