The Trouble with TV

Steve Cutts, Evolution

At nearly fifty years old, my life has been inundated with television since I began this incarnation.  My grandmother once told me that she got a TV early on (1950s era) and it attracted a fair-weather friend who came over only to watch soap operas.  She was one of the few people I remember who budgeted the amount of time the television was on.  My best friend's house was far different: they had cable TV in the early 80s.  Cable back then did not have commercials.  If regular TV was cocaine, cable was crack.  We watched countless R-rated movies without any form of adult supervision.  No wonder Generation X is so fond of its foul language and Facebook drama: our childhoods were chock full of both in the form of cable TV.  As a teenager, I began to be bored by most TV despite my entire family remaining addicted to it.  Despite my overall dissatisfaction and boredom with TV, my brother and I still fought to watch it when we went to our family vacation cottage as children, as if there wasn't an entire world waiting outside for us to break out of our trance and join it.

Approximately fifteen years ago, my salary class aspirations got flushed down the toilet when the company my husband worked for as a high level executive crumbled due to managerial infighting and incompetence.  My budget tightened like a noose as I scrambled to cut costs.  I played a constant game of Whack the Pop-Up Expense to fend off the forces that sought to consume the contents of my tiny, dwindling bank account.  One day the incredible noise of Duck Dynasty, a  reality TV show about a group of loud, redneck hunters emanated from the next room.  I strongly suggested to my husband that I wanted to get rid of our TV and its accompanying package of channels; he reluctantly agreed we could do without it.  We have never gone back, though this is mainly due to my status as the breadwinner of the house.  My husband likes TV a great deal more than I do and would most likely pay the hefty fees per month for a package of deluxe channels if he had the money to do it.  

The Astral and Etheric Poison Effects of TV

Consider a stereotype about the Boomer generation: the Boomer sits transfixed in front of the television most of his or her waking hours, slowly losing the ability to do anything except sit and watch.  The characters on TV become more real to him than his family.  There is more than a few grains of truth to the stereotype.

In Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream, an elderly woman named Sarah Goldfarb retreats into television and diet pill addiction as her adult son and his friends retreat into their own parallel heroin addictions.  The genius of Requiem for a Dream is its brutal portrayal of Sarah's addiction, which is just as destructive and deadly as a descent into illegal drugs.  TV is designed to be addictive and the majority of American Boomers fell for it.  

On the astral plane, TV creates a mess of emotional manipulation mixed with addictive dependency.  The watcher’s best instincts of charity, love, friendliness, and bravery are turned against him as he becomes an inert captive, watching other people living a facsimile of the karmic lessons he should be out there having in real life.  Breaks in the monotony of programming are more potent and obvious brainwashing: commercials.  Again, we have an astral mess of being urged to eat “healthfully” yet being bombarded with images of processed convenience food.  Is it any surprise the TV-addicted Boomer has a refrigerator that resembles a small morgue with a smell to match?  Pre-packaged convenience foods seldom live up to their advertising. 

TV manipulates via mixed messages. The lovely, slim actors and actresses indulge in every vice yet remain beautiful and enviable. One moment, there is an ad or a product placement for convenience food. Thirty seconds later, there are two ads for the latest pharmaceutical drug to treat a disease caused by a sedentary lifestyle that involves eating lots of convenience food.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Despite the proliferation of emotional puppeteering designed to engage do-goodnik instincts among sedentary watchers, TV is a bad influence. The worst kind of behavior is treated with reverence and fascination on TV regardless of the fictional or nonfictional nature of the program. Crime shows about cops who run around chasing murderers and rapists are thinly disguised profiteering off of the excitement created by evildoers.  Without evildoers, the chickenhawk planted firmly on the couch would have nobody to look down upon. Without the alcoholic celebrity stumbling from hook up to hook up on the reality show, the wannabe would have no darkness to use in order to compare and contrast her beige, corporation-enslaved life.

In Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a teenaged boy named Kevin goes on a massacre and slaughters other kids and teachers in his school.  When Kevin returns home, he murders everyone in his family except for his mother, forcing her to live down the shame of having a mass murderer for a son.  After Kevin goes to prison, he is interviewed by a media reporter.  Kevin remarks:

 

"All of you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot.  Bought and paid for.  That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me.  You want my plot.  I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way.  TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee.  Ever since, I've known what my life is about.  I give good story.  It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it.  You ate it up.  Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll.  Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog."

 

The Feng Shui of the Black Box

The television is etheric poison.  Even when off, the TV is an ugly black box.  The only way it is ever going to blend into its surroundings is when it is either in a store full of other TVs or if it is hidden by the doors of an armoire as was fashionable in the 90s.  When it is on, it perpetuates a colorful and bombastic assault that destroys entire rooms with its etheric miasma.  If the average person could see the etheric plane, the television would look like a chemical spill vomiting its rainbow tinted poison in a toxic pool around itself.  The only true way of cleaning up the noxious spill of the TV is by getting rid of the device entirely. 

Video Games

Games or what used to be called video games are hideous astral plane polluters, replacing the normal functions of human imagination with caricatured worlds of television-like brainwashing. If you want to take a perfectly normal young man and turn him into a miserable, pale, flabby drudge who accomplishes no original works and never realizes his own unique potential, by all means introduce him to video game addiction. 

Video games are expensive.  The equipment and sheer computing power needed to use them cannot and will not exist in a world where server farms are no longer subsidized and where internet is expensive to the average person.  As in the case of the TV addict, we have an inert captive living vicariously through a fake, prefab set of characters.  Life lessons aren’t lived and learned; they are procrastinated and set aside for a “later” that will hopefully never arrive.  Once again, the television dominates the living space like a black hole, and instead of providing cooked food, heat, and warmth like the fireplaces of old, it is a cold electronic eye that watches and sucks the vitality of humans even while it is asleep. 

One of the reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation was the influence of TV and games.  I was addicted to PacMan by the age of 10 and by TV and movies at the age of 18.  I was addicted despite knowing better and feeling in my gut that it was wrong to fritter away the hours in front of the barking, bleeping screen.  If I could not resist the pull of the electronic hypnotist, how on Earth would I keep my child from becoming an addict?  My hat is off to any parent nowadays who is able to sanely budget their child’s TV and game time.  I don’t think I could have pulled it off and that is why I decided not to do it.

The Rise of Influencers

The influence of TV has been supplanted by the rise of influencers, but this is not to say that influencer culture is any better than TV addiction. Influencing as a career offers far more than TV because unlike the world of Hollywood, there are no gatekeepers.  Though the Kardashian/Jenners and their ilk may be plagued with rumors about how they maintain their top dog status, top influencers do not need to be part of the alleged Satanic, supposedly fecalphiliac/infanticidal elite. All that is needed to get in to influencing is a mobile phone with a decent camera. Lovely young girls can stay far away from the neo-Harvey Weinsteins of the world and still make all the money. Like Kevin of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the influencer is not the watcher, she is the watchee.

The influencer is perfectly happy to leave the habits of her Boomer grandparents behind in order to embrace a new and equally fake set of images. Unlike the Boomer's worship of prettied-up celebrities, her altar is the digital mirror. Her own prettied-up, photo-edited, "improved" face and body becomes the standard by which all must be measured. The cadre of ghosts that haunt the aging Hollywood celeb become much more personal, and therein lies the rub.  Influencing takes a great deal of energy across the planes: like gaming, it only exists because of subsidized internet grids. Like a TV watching habit, it is a time suck extraordinaire to create the content and to whip the avatar into apparent good shape. Last but not least, there is the pouring of one's entire spirit into the avatar and the investment in its fake karma and destiny. But that's a topic for future conversation.

TV Isn't All Bad!

I am a visual learner and I owe much of my current knowledge directly to the television. Being a visual learner means that it often takes me three times as long to learn via written instruction as it does from watching a few boring, jerky images on a screen. I have learned countless skills from television: I remember Sesame Street helping me count, Schoolhouse Rock helping me understand the functions of government, heaven knows how many origami and cooking videos, and last night's tech guy video teaching me how to use Open Broadcasting Software (OBS). As I mentioned, I don't have TV, but I do have a computer screen that functions in much the same way.  

I use TV to learn but I also use it to relax. I am no stranger to movies and various series. I often watch them while I exercise on my stationary bike.  Right now, I am watching a sweet series from Japan called The Maikanai: Cooking for the Maiko House on Netflix. The show is a subtle education on what the daily lives of maiko (apprentice geisha) are like and since it is in Japanese, it is a good intro/review of Japanese language. It's also a straight up entertaining show. I am grateful for TV and much like any other pastime that can turn into a vice, I believe it is fine in moderation.

Humans are weird and we can turn anything into an addiction.  The moral of the story here, I think, is to recognize the good and the bad of the omnipresent screen and to do what little we can to amplify -- and be thankful for -- the good.