I was watching the impeachment trial the other day (nothing like a little CSPAN to wake up) and I began to wonder what was wrong. I mean, here we are, our “fearless” Commander-In-Chief is on trial and nobody seems to care. Shouldn’t we become a little more interested in what happens to the future of our country, perhaps just a little.
It’s frustrating sometimes and totally hilarious other times (it tends to be more on the hilarious side…for me anyway). Our lives revolve around TV, even if there’s nothing on. Whether it’s a new episode of 90210 or General Hospital, TV is a part of our society. Yet, we just can’t seem to watch something important (I guess the “really important” news is the astonishing finding that Bigfoot has a zipper in his costume. After all Bigfoot was instrumental in shaping…well, nothing).
From the people who brought you the O.J. Trial we now have the Clinton Trial. The American Judicial system has become America’s best-running Soap Opera. And to make things worse we have dozens of “political analysts” yelling at each other over who’s right and wrong. Since when did politics become a third grade playground scene (I think someone will have to stay after school)?
One of my favorite news shows, though it only ran for a short time, was Weekly World News. Sure you’ve seen it in the newsstand, but believe it or not it actually had a TV show. Amazing, I wonder if anyone believed anything the show said? It was good for a laugh though.
Are we really supposed to believe everything we see on TV?
Has anyone ever seen Wag the Dog? Remember the part when William Macy is telling Robert DeNiro that there’s no war in Albania? (Don’t you border on the Adriatic?) What does DeNiro say? Something to the effect of: “Yeah there is, because I’m watching it on TV.” Doesn’t anyone ever wonder how often a scenario like that happens? Maybe there really isn’t a Saddam Hussein, the war was just a TV show. It makes you think, doesn’t it?
Bruce Springsteen had a song a few years back, titled “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).” The song is absolutely, 100 percent true. You ever notice how there are 18 shopping channels, 28 news channels, 10 music channels (that never play music), and 3,000 religious channels (who are always demanding our money). Now they even have food channels. We can watch people cook food, then they laugh at us because they know we could never cook anything that good. Even better, we can watch people build a house. Like we could really see what they are doing on TV, then go to our workroom and do the exact same thing. Yet, we seem to watch nothing for hours on end. It’s as though TV casts a spell over us, then it makes us dumber.
Take the weather forecast, for example. It seems to me that they used to only predict (I use the term lightly) the weather for a couple of days. Now they have the week forecast, soon they’ll have the month then the year. Shouldn’t they learn to get the day’s forecast right before they attempt to predict even longer periods of time?
I think the only thing we can do is…Party like it’s 1999…no, just kidding…sit back and laugh.
Published Feb. 1, 1999, in The Denisonian of Denison University.