CHCH News - By the Tube's Eerie Light

They talk too much, was my first thought, of these houseguests

They were groomed immaculately; they were outwardly smiles and affability, but the conversation was one-way...and nonstop. And what they lacked in discretion, was more than made up in ignorance. When not prattling on about the banal, they revealed their abysmal ignorance about news and public affairs. They had their opinions, those opinions weren't supported by anything factual, and the less the proof, the harder the insistence.

Rudely they talked down to us, insisting everyone knows what I did not know and didn't see. They told me things I knew weren't true and proffered these as proofs. The hectoring voices, the implied insults, the insufferable ignorance were all more than I could bear in my own front room.

No longer able to control my anger, I moved toward them - but my elderly mother interfered. Katie and Matt and obese, buffoonish Al Roker...those are her friends. Television is her vice and addiction. And if I didn't like it, if I wanted some quiet, I could take my morning coffee on the back patio - amid the frost.

In this she's not alone. The center of the American home isn't the hearth anymore; nor the kitchen. It's not even the bathroom, as John Steinbeck once suggested. No - it's the television set.

Think of that for a moment. The center of life, the font of education and the source of news...is an electronic device which delivers the likes of Dan Rather and Katie Couric into our private places.

It must fill a need. More than 50 percent of Americans watch between two and four hours of television every day.

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Much has changed since FCC Chairman Newton Minow condemned television as "a vast wasteland" in 1961. It's moved beyond the white-bread banal, to vulgarity, adolescent titillation...and propaganda.

Propaganda. Yes - the taking of half-truths, untruths, misrepresented facts...and repeating them endlessly. Global warming...the President's lies..."cuts" in Federal programs...the "stolen" election of 2000...and the tying of Halliburton to the increased price in foreign crude oil. All of this is delivered nonstop to a gullible public, in vulnerable moments - while they're working their Mr. Coffees and buttering their Montana Mills toast.

Yes, propaganda works. And it works best on an audience whose guard is down, who is preoccupied or absorbed or tired.

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Two anecdotes come to mind here. The first is the old joke, that of the owner of a business which is failing: "Yeah, we tried advertising once, and it didn't work." Of course - advertising has to berepetitive, a campaign, for to be effective. It's a sort of marketplace propaganda.

The other is from the short stories of James Herriott (James Alfred Wright) the Scots veterinarian so celebrated by PBS. He had done an essay of a short visit to Estonia in 1961, and commented on the constant presence of Soviet propaganda broadcast on loudspeakers in workplaces and market stalls and every public space available. Not speaking Russian or having a translator, he had no clue as to the content, but he found it irritating beyond measure. It was all-omnipresent; there was no avoiding it.

It kept a population from rebelling from a failed bureaucratic dictatorship, for three generations. The proles no longer took it seriously; but without another worldview or framework of facts, they really had no psychological choice but to accept such a worldview as the correct and true one.

And then there's our own culture. We're notforced to listen to a stream of state-sponsored-sewerage of the mind (although PBS and NPR patrons do exactly that, by choice); no, it was offered up seductively. First, the magic of the new medium...the attraction not unlike this very one upon which you're reading my pedestrian musings.

That gave way to the escapist nature of the offerings. People portrayed were pretty and attractive and their lives as shown were to be envied. And then came evidence of the persuasive nature...the TV Western; the product placement and the ads which transferred Camel cigarettes from a dying brand to the hottest seller in RJReynolds' portfolio.

Then the Tube began delivering The Message. We all enjoyed laughing with Red Skelton and the banal sitcoms of the 1960s. Stupid and trite but, aside from time wasted, nothing to fear - if they were shown in mixed company, or used on children as an electronic pacifier.

The Norman Lear comedies slipped in a new element. Archie Bunker was a caricature of Everyman, the middle-aged WWII veteran of the time, and with Lear's gentle and witty prodding, we were encouraged to laugh at him. Meathead, the butt of so many of Archie's remarks, was portrayed as a reasonable font of wisdom...quiet, schooled, reasonable. And liberal.

Through these programs, we learned that abortion was good, that premarital promiscuity was sophisticated, that Affirmative Action was not only a proper remedy for racial Original Sin, but to certain minorities, their due.

Norman Lear's campaigning for McGovern in 1972, through his characters - and I remember it well - didn't take the candidate very far. Perhaps the Republican camp's realization of what a weak candidate was the Senator, kept them from demanding Equal Time under the Fairness Doctrine of the time.

But a trend was set. The wise and clever set was now free to mouth, on stage and in camera, endorsement of specific views and candidates.

Nor was this isolated to the entertainment arena...such could be written off (and was) as "social commentary." The news divisions were waging theirown war...on the War To End All War Involvement. The news divisions had declared war on the Vietnam War.

And that was an easy target. We, the voters, the citizens, were led in under false and misleading pretenses. We saw it escalate under two Presidents, of two parties, one of which had promised the opposite. The casualty count was appalling. Things were clearly not copasetic.

Except, of course, that the reason for these problems lay in control of objectives. Politicians were staging the war and overruling professional warriors. Not all these politicians were liberal; but what they were doing was trying to wage a war under liberal precepts.

A war of occupation was being fought as a war of containment. The result was failure; a greater failure then the most ignoble retreat might have been. And the news media, ignoring the reasons for failure, branded the war and the Truman Doctrine of Communist containment a failure.

Vietnam fell. Laos and Cambodia fell. The slaughters that resulted, the reprisals and political punishments and resettlements based on pastoral fantasies - these were humanitarian tragedies which made Auschwitz look like a girls' summer camp.

And all this happened because of The Tube. Because certain people behind the curtain of Tubeland held certain opinions, wrong as it turned out...and discovered the power of the medium in disseminating slanted or twisted or wronginformation. Presenting it to that segment of the population least able to critically judge it.

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The power of the Tube continues. At some point in my life, I turned the flickering, damnable blue-light off...it was the second go-round in college, when I was framing a term-paper on Vietnam and discovered, to my surprise, that the motivations behind involvement were neither criminal nor mistaken. Only the strategy was flawed; and that was the result of placement of idiot-savants like McNamara in charge of policy decisions. McNamara knew numbers...and little else.

I tuned out. That in itself is an education...when you don't partake of the cultural universal, when you don't drink the Kool-Aid with the rest of the good Jonestown burghers, you notice things. You notice how things which don't follow, which don't make logical sense, are just taken as fact. At least, by some people.

By a large sum of people.

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A certain percent of voters chose a certain candidate for President in this most recent election. This candidate was born into Old Money - no shame there, it's just a foreign territory - and who, all his life, has adopted Leftist causes to champion.

In the heart of the Vietnam War, he volunteered his services, such as they were, to the Navy. The Navy saw fit to commission him - a poor reflection on them. According to one document I have seen, and I cannot vouch for it, this officer candidate requested, as emphatically as possible, duty and assignment Stateside.

He was sent to Vietnam. He volunteered for a reconnaissance team called Swiftboats - just as they were being transformed into mobile assault units.

He served four months of a yearlong tour. He pulled God-knows-what strings to obtain Purple Heart medals on wounds which didn't break skin.

He went home and slandered troops. By his own words he implicated himself in admitted "war crimes."

He married a fine young girl with a fine old trust fund. Two kids and fifteen years later, he had the marriage "annulled" - which is the Catholic Church's only way of dissolution.

It got the Candidate off the hook. In the process, it declared the issue of that marriage illegitimate, and the woman nothing more than a concubine. A concubine no longer with a trust fund.

The fine qualified Candidate, severed from his liquid assets, discovered lobbyists' monies. He obtained the moniker, "Cash 'n' Kerry."

He discovered true love. In a late colleague's widow. The colleague was the richest man in the Senate and his widow was the craziest person in Pennsylvania outside of an institution. It was a case of true love...John's appetites and Terayza's cash

The Candidate enjoyed the campaign. An inconvenient photo-op at Wendy's terminated at the garbage pail and an SOS to the yacht-club maiter 'd. A needed break, skiing at Sun Valley, went on apace even with Secret Service's gratitutious shoves to knock down the Candidate

Another unnamed plot caught The Candidate in his Captain Queeg moment: "These guys are the most crooked - you know - lying group I have ever seen..."

The Tube, the newsreaders off in Tubeland, delivered none of this.

Instead, it and they offered the predigested nuggets. "Bush Lied." "Imminent threat." "Radical takeover." "Loss of freedoms." The idiots who predigested them were the idiots roasting weenies at Waco and saluting Clinton for his decisiveness.

And then there was Blather. Blather, months earlier, was all-but orally servicing a certain dictator of certain life-denying habits....and then when said dictator fell, Blather was offering a sloppy forgery and a half-baked tale of influence peddling to whoever watched, almost as unblinkingly as the camera.

It was idiocy, of course. Transparent and dishonest. Almost as cheap and tawdry and valueless as The Candidate being championed.

Nonetheless and for all of that; therefore and Q.E.D and what the hell, The Candidate With The Stellar Performance And Personal Record won 48 percent of the popular vote.

How is that? The unions and the pamphleteers and other appendages of the political machine can take some credit...but only so much. A lie only has power over those who accept it. Someone with a base of reference will recognize it for the trash it is and crack the lie-vendor on the skull.

But what of the person who has no base of reference?

What of the sub-normal - or perhaps more accurately, the normal-normal - whose day starts with Matt Lauer and ends with David Letterman? Who's treated to a steady stream of factoids and tidbits and reported items...which add up to a picturewhich just isn't true?

It's the nature of the medium. Social conservatives can prattle on about "cleaning up" television; about offering up "fair and balanced" news. It doesn't address the underlying problem.

The problem is our lifestyle...or more accurately, our social-familial breakdown. A confiscatory tax burden, coupled with glorification of working women, have escalated in a vicious circle into circumstances which push those mothers who do NOT want to work, into the workplace. This because the more-affluent two-wageearner households have driven up prices for homes and rent...simple economics.

So. Mom's off to work in one direction and one time while Daddy aims in another direction. The kids go off to school breakfasts, extended schooldays and latchkey homecomings. Dinner is frozen or ordered or purchased in a white sack, under the countenance of Ronald the Clown.

Dinner is reduced to biological imperatives. There is no bonding or social interaction. The resultant emotional vacuum...is the need and market for The Tube.

And that, folks, is the heart of the matter. All the talk of destruction of the family: It has happened. We've allowed social engineers to rip the heart out of our homes, and replace it with a cyber-bonding tool, a seductive tool to entertain and hold attention.

A tool which was easily, eagerly, voluntarily, co-opted and ceded to people whose aim is to expand government power and control.

Until we recognize this, we will continue to be inundated with greater and more outrageous untruths and distortions; and more reckless and baseless, valueless candidates for leadership of our nation.

Until and unless we rebel, until we change our values and life, we are in real danger of forfeit of our birthright - our economic and political freedoms.

November 18, 2004

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Engineman, sailorman, gravedigger, thief - JustPassinThru has been all of these and more. A former political-science student, a lifelong vagabond and a highly trained observer of the human condition, he now writes his misconceptions on the Web - while he searches for better-paying employment and waits to find out What The Deuce Is Next.

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