TV Trauma

It has come to my attention that one cannot watch TV anymore without having to constantly watch a commercial, and I feel that as Americans we should not put up with this injustice any more. Who is it that came up with the Idea that from now on every major television network must have their logo displayed in the lower right hand corner of the screen perpetually? If that was not bad enough one has to endure the constant reminder of what shows are going to be coming up next and what new shows will be airing for the rest of the season. All of this popping up and disappearing as if we really need to know that the new season of “The Closer” will be starting next Tuesday and we are currently watching “Law and Order” on TNT. You may also have noticed that the only time these little reminders are conspicuously absent occur during the commercials. Apparently the people who pay for advertizing do not want competition during their spots. In any case it is currently impossible to watch any programming that is free of these little abominations.

I believe that the Internet may be somewhat responsible for this cacophony since we have all been desensitized to the effects of ads popping up all over the place but it seems to me that this has gotten out of control. How can one appreciate that Leonardo Dicaprio has just declared himself “King of the World” when one is being reminded that “WWE Super Slam” is coming this fall. I guess it was decided at some focus group that people enjoy watching some little graphic or text streaming across the screen while they watch a news anchor spew his mindless dribble. So the next step was to take this concept and ruin what was left of television programming. Why is it necessary for me to know what show I am watching any way? If I didn’t want to watch it I would watch something else or nothing at all. No, they must let me know that I am currently watching CSI on TNT, because I might be unaware of what show I am watching due to sudden amnesia and I actually may give a rats’ ass which network it’s on.

Last time I checked there are only two shows on TV anyway. “Law and Order” and “CSI”. They are repackaged and disguised as different shows and syndicated on so many different networks that it actually appears as if there are many different shows on TV. “CSI” actually seems to be four different shows, “CSI Miami”, “CSI Las Vegas”, “CSI New York” and “NCSI”. Which seems to have something to do with the navy but I’m not sure. “Law and Order” has many different incarnations as well. “Law and Order Special Victims Unit”, “Law and Order Criminal Intent”, regular “Law and Order” and about four other Law and Orders which I cannot name off the top of my head, but rest assured if I am watching “Law and Order” I do not need a little graphic in the corner of the screen to tell me that I am watching “Law and Order”. Whoever came up with this idea of constant advertising without end except for during the advertisements should be taken out behind the barn and shot, along with the guy who came up with the idea of putting little stickers on all fresh fruits and vegetables.

There are to be fair some other things to watch on TV, after all they have to find something to fill up the seven hundred or so channels that are now available. Mostly there are Movies which we have all seen before, which is OK with me but I really wish that they would stop telling me that it is the world premier or network television premier or any kind of premier. Chances are I have seen the movie seventeen times already and whether or not it is the TBS Superstation premier will probably not influence my chances of watching it for the eighteenth time.

Besides movies the other shows that are available for viewing are invariably that type of programming now known as reality TV. The reality TV movement was spawned by the very popular show known as “Survivor”. This is a show in which contestants are left in hostile wilderness environments around the world and must survive somehow without any modern conveniences until one eventually wins one million dollars. They do battle with each other and compete for things like a plate of Oreo cookies or a slice of pizza. This is all well and good but instead of “Survivor Fiji” or “Survivor Africa” I would prefer to see something like “Survivor South Bronx” or “Survivor Crenshaw”.

One of the many reality shows that arose from this movement is seen on MTV and is called “The Real World”. In this program a group of teens all of which look like models are made to live together in a luxury waterfront condo with all expenses paid. Usually they have access to their own private pool and wave runner jet skis docked outside. Their daily activities include going out to clubs and having sex with each other. This occasionally produces love triangles and makes for good television but I am guessing that for some one who works in a factory in Cleveland driving a forklift this show does not accurately reflect the real world. It is also puzzling that given their situation, people that appear on “The Real World” are always bitter about something and fighting with each other. Other than that I have no Idea what the show is about or if it has any purpose what so ever but rest assured if you are watching it you will invariably see the MTV logo displayed in the corner of the screen. That alone is enough to piss me off, forget about the fact that MTV no longer shows music videos and instead only reruns episodes of “The Real World”.

One has to wonder what Francis Ford Coppola might think watching his classic “The God Father” on TNT and in one corner of the screen he sees the TNT logo and then suddenly in the other corner of the screen appears the message, “You’re watching The God Father on TNT”.

The point is this. Do we really need to be told what show we are watching? Is it really that important that we must be reminded what network we are watching constantly? Am I the only one that finds these little graphic reminders pointless and infuriating? Surely I am not. It is time for Americans to rise up and say ENOUGH! No more will we tolerate little graphics in the corner of our television screens. And guess what. If I want to know what show is coming up next I need only to check my numerous guide channels and on screen programming guides or look in TV guide or check the papers or any one of a thousand other ways to find out what is coming up next, including just waiting until the show I am watching ends and then continuing to watch until the next show begins. However I am sure that once I have figured out what show I am watching a small message will appear on the screen to tell me what show I am watching any way.

I submit to you that if as a nation we are too stupid to know what television show we are watching at any given time, and must be required by TV law to know which network we are watching at all times, we are in serious trouble. Are we watching the TV or is the TV really watching us. Telling us what to think and therefore what to do and when to do it. I cannot as a child remember watching the news and seeing other news items streaming by like a stock ticker at the bottom of the screen while some graphic reminded me of what show I was watching. In the old days they had graphics at the beginning of the news and then a news anchor told you of the top stories of the day with an occasional break to get the skinny from some reporter on the scene. It was all very exciting. Sure they still have all that, but today as Wolf Blitzer is in “The Situation Room” telling you about insurgent bombings in Iraq invariably there will be some story going by on the ticker about how a man was rushed to the hospital after having an erection that lasted more than four hours when he overdosed on Viagra. The two stories don’t really have anything to do with each other yet they are bundled together anyway. To make sure that you have all the information that you can handle at once they will throw in the current stock market averages and a neat little graphic telling you that you are watching “The Situation Room”.

Indeed it seems that the mission of every news organization or TV network is to give one so much more information than they could possibly ever need to know that one will feel positively lost if they are not watching the TV.

It is my observation that the ethics of television programming have been severely degraded as well as the ethics of television advertizing although it seems that the latter is hardly possible. It’s true though. Since Reagan vetoed the “Fairness Doctrine” back in 1987, news programming in which a discussion of issues by a so-called panel of experts is involved has suffered terribly. Usually instead of an enlightening debate we get a bunch of pundits who agree with each other getting together to discuss the various reasons they all agree with each other. This was never more evident than during the run up to the Iraq war in which it seemed that ninety percent of all news reporters had suddenly turned into retired army generals or ex CIA operatives.

As far as advertizing is concerned, suffice it to say that in the sixties and seventies and indeed right up until the early nineties it seemed that certain things were off limits to television advertising, such as prescription drugs and hard liquor. Not so any more. In fact, now I routinely watch in amazement while some announcer says, “stop taking such and such if you have a sudden decrease in hearing or vision”. In other words it may not be worth going deaf, dumb and blind so you can get an erection. I am quite often astonished to hear an announcer warn that “side effects can include blood clot stroke or heart attack” while a group of perky young women muse about how happy they are with their new birth control pill. In fact I have often heard announcers say that “Death” yes that’s right “Death” could be a side effect of the drug they are telling you to go out and buy right now.

These days it is quite often hard to discern an advertisement from a regular show. In this age of paid programming and the infomercial, you could watch two doctors talk about the benefits of fish oil in the diet for twenty minutes before you realizes that you are watching an ad for some diet supplement made of sharks fin. You may be tipped off when the announcer suddenly says “for only nineteen dollars plus shipping and handling you can get a three months supply, and further more if you call within the next twenty minutes you can get an addition three months supply absolutely free”.

It appears that as far as television advertising is concerned anything goes and any outrageous claim can be made with no fear of false advertising charges being filed. I have seen entire shows aired in which some guy claims he has bought respectable two thousand square foot houses for less than two hundred dollars, and he will teach you how to do it too. At least in the old days it seemed that some form of accountability was expected from the people who advertised their products. Now it seems that the watchdog groups are so over whelmed by the thousands of outrageous claims made by advertisers that they must rely on the average person to sift through what he thinks is garbage and what he thinks may actually be possible. That seems fair enough. I mean if the average citizen actually believes that one can eat eighteen thousand calories a day, do no exercise and gain zero pounds by simply taking a pill with every meal, then they deserve to be trapped in their house for the remainder of their life and buried in a piano case.

Often you will see a network disclaimer after one of these infomercials that says something like “ the opinions and views expressed in the preceding paid advertisement do not reflect the opinions and views of the blah blah blah”. That is code for “We don’t believe a word of the crock of shit you just watched”.

Incredibly, Americans are buying into all this nonsense or the people who make these infomercials wouldn’t even bother. It never ceases to amaze me what people will choose to believe and or not to believe.

After combing the entire country of Iraq inch by inch with teams of inspectors for ten plus years we still have not found any shred of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed any weapons of mass destruction and yet according to a recent Harris poll, some fifty percent of Americans say they still believe he did. The fact is people believe what they want to believe. I mean if you are watching some program about Bigfoot and a team of scientists, with all kinds of equipment are analyzing footage of what looks like a humanoid apelike creature walking in a remote area of the northwest. You might think…. yeah, that’s possible. Or you may choose to think, as a good friend of mine once put it, “Dude, it’s a guy in a suit!” I personally choose to think that it’s a guy in a suit. Why? Well it seems to me that if there were the existence of this creature that we would have found some fossil evidence or bones or something else to verify his existence now or at some time in the past, but as of yet nothing has been found. But that does not deter the American people, no they choose to believe what they want to believe, it is their right.

Forget the fact that dinosaur bones have been found that have been carbon dated to seventy million years old, there are some in this country that believe the entire planet is no more than six thousand years old. I guess that since there is no mention of dinosaurs in The Bible those people must think that the Tyrannosaurus Rex on display at the Museum of Natural History is just a neat little exhibit molded out of clay for the kiddies.

Certainly one of the great problems with this country of ours is that the TV is way too influential when it comes to us deciding what we are going to believe and or not believe. When Colon Powel the then Secretary of State held up a vile of botulinum toxin at UN hearings and proclaimed that the photos behind him were of mobile labs that were producing tons of the stuff, I believed him. When it was later found that the mobile labs were actually milk trucks and that there was no botulinum toxin found anywhere in Iraq, Colin Powel eventually stepped down as the secretary of state. I guess he doesn’t like to be lied to any more than the rest of us. When George Bush claimed in his state of the union address that the Nigerians were processing enriched uranium or “Yellow Cake” as it is called, for Saddam Hussein, I didn’t believe him. That one I got right. It turns out that the CIA dispatched a guy named Joe Wilson to check out the story and after he came back with no evidence to back up the claim he was summarily shunned by the administration, which then leaked that his wife, a woman named Valery Plame was a CIA agent. She was working under cover at the time.

All of these events unfolded on television and as Americans we chose to believe them or not believe them as we saw fit. If you are a Bush supporter you probably still believe the Nigerians were trying to help Saddam enrich uranium. You probably don’t believe that any one in the administration authorized revealing the identity of a CIA agent working under cover. After all that would be treason, an offence punishable by death. It’s funny though because most people tended to believe the late Tim Russert and respected him as a fair journalist. I certainly did. Tim Russert was one of the newsmen who testified in front of a grand jury that members of the administration leaked the story about Valery Plame, and since I believe Tim Russert, I believe the story. A guy named Scooter Libby ended up taking the fall for all this stuff but President Bush quickly pardoned him, as if to say “Hey no harm no foul”. One can only speculate as to how many of Valery Plames’ contacts have now gone mysteriously missing.

You can believe what you want to believe. That is one of the freedoms that we cling to so tightly in this country. Freedom of speech, freedom to lie, freedom to believe the lie, freedom to create ones’ own reality. If your reality is not working for you, just create a new one and believe in that instead. After all it’s a free country. Again the TV provides us with plenty of new realities to choose from daily.

One reality that many Americans chose to believe was that anyone making fifty thousand dollars a year or even less could afford a six hundred and fifty thousand dollar house. Of course the barrage of TV advertisements from Banks and Lenders offering to refinance and lower your mortgage rates helped people to believe that. No matter how dire the situation was they could always borrow more money until things got better. May be this slogan sounds familiar. “Nobody can do what Countrywide can.” Well apparently nobody can do what Countrywide was doing including Country Wide. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy the company was saved by Bank of America who bought it up just before Countrywide stock went to zero.

For some reason many thought that they could get rich by purchasing houses and fixing them up to sell for a big profit. A rash of TV shows that featured people doing exactly that fueled this notion. “Flip this House”, “Designed to sell”, and “Flipping Out”, are just a few of the titles that come to mind. My particular favorite is “Designed to sell”. In this show a young couple or family that is trying to sell their house gets the help of a designer to fix up their house, which has been languishing on the market. They always end up selling the house for much more than they ever dreamed possible. The designer gets a budget of two thousand dollars and never spends one cent more than that. Usually they remodel the bathroom and the Kitchen and paint the entire front of the house and landscape the front yard all within this budget. I know, you are wondering how can they possibly do all that for only two thousand dollars? It’s simple. They always have a team of about eight of the most skilled carpenters electricians and plumbers working round the clock without sleep for about six days for nothing, but Hey! Do it yourselfers, if you want to believe that you can remodel a kitchen and a bathroom and completely landscape the front yard for two thousand dollars that is your right as an American.

I truly believe that television has been largely to blame for the current housing crisis we are experiencing as a nation and that as Americans we have made some rather stupid choices with regard to this issue. Surely people who are now in foreclosure should have tried better to understand what an adjustable rate mortgage is. If you have an ARM now you are probably going to be paying an arm and a leg later.

While the American dream lives on, the American fantasy is thankfully over. There will be some pain to get through but as a nation we will press on as we always have. However some of the Banks that got caught up in the sub prime mortgage meltdown, and had to write down billions of dollars after people defaulted on their mortgages will not press on. No they will be pressed out of business. To the lenders that made these “sub prime” loans I can only say this. What the hell were you thinking? As far as I can tell, a “sub prime loan” is a loan that is made to a jackass with bad credit that has no verifiable form of income and no chance in hell of ever being able to make his payments. Since these borrowers have bad credit the terms of their loans are less favorable. That makes a lot of sense. Make it harder for those that have less ability to pay. So for the banks that got in trouble backing these types of loans I have only this to say. Good luck with that.

People believed that everyone was getting rich off of their houses and that is exactly what the TV kept telling them. They also believed that they could take any piece of crap house and turn it into a palace in a matter of weeks by simply going to Home Depot and buying a few ceramic tiles and some paint. After all, that’s what we saw so and so do on HGTV. People also believed they could cure any ailment simply by taking a pill. Or that they could go from being three hundred and fifty pounds and morbidly obese to a slim hundred and eighty pounds with two percent body fat by working out just fifteen minutes a day three times a week on a home gym. Now we all know what happens to those home gyms after about the first month. They end up folded under the bed never to be seen again.

Let’s face it America, we have serious problems that aren’t getting any better, and no amount of television watching will ever cure them. Think about the concept of “Demand destruction” for a minute. When Oil recently hit more than one hundred and forty seven dollars per barrel an interesting thing happened. People actually started to drive less because of soaring gas prices. Within three weeks the price of oil dropped almost thirty percent to about one hundred and twelve dollars per barrel. The average American watches about three and a half hours of television a day. When we are not watching TV we are usually in front of a computer screen or Blackberry or other type of cell phone, all these activities involve looking at a screen but the big culprit with out a doubt is the good old TV, and now we can rot our brains in HD. If we could get our collective TV watching per day down to about two hours and forty five minutes I believe that would bode very well for this country. If we stopped watching so much TV we might have time to do some other really great things like solve the energy crisis or create a third political party. Who knows in what ways our economy would benefit from the increased productivity of a work force that recaptures forty-five minutes of time per day. Also cable and satellite TV would become less expensive due to “demand destruction” and we could expand this practice to include watching less movies there by lowering the average admission price. Who knows, if we exert enough pressure on the industry the networks might even agree to do away with those annoying little pop up ads and remove their logos from the corner of the screen. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for that.