© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 31
Welcome to my New Year. I’m sure it’s going to be almost exactly like the last one, full of days and months that rush by as if they have just realized that they are going to be late for their meetings or something like that. It’s going to be a great year, as soon as the hangover goes away.
I have not made any New Year’s resolutions that I will regret. I did not promise to wash the dog once a week, take up mud-wrestling or learn how to make small talk. The secret to making a New Year’s resolution is to aim for something you already do well. My resolution is easy: I’m only going to watch television in the event of major terrorist attacks, tidal waves or if there is something I really want to watch.
Civilisations rise and fall due to incredibly stupid ideas. As far as I know Carthage made the mistake of trying to blackmail the Romans with a bunch of elephants and a general called Hannibal, who didn’t know a diplomatic initiative from a side of raw beef. The Romans got stupid by drinking water from lead pipes and allowed the Goths in. The British Empire probably declined as a result of insufferably polite bureaucracy combined with tropical heat and major consumption of gin and tonic. A couple of hundred years from now, our descendants will probably look back and say, “Gee, television was one really dumb move!”
Television is probably the quickest way to put a complete halt to thought, with the possible exceptions of puberty, alcohol or death. Try this experiment to test my theorem: turn on the television, sit down and watch for ten minutes. If you can turn it off after ten minutes, try and identify any major thoughts. You probably had none, with the possible exception of going to the bathroom during an ad break, a notion that hardly qualifies for the Nobel Prize.
The usual behaviour pattern of almost everyone with television is to go home and turn the set on. At this point all forms of conversation and interaction die or are carried out during ad breaks. The only effective form of input is the television.
For those of you who are not particularly computer literate, or who have spent the last thirty years with the television on, ‘input’ is the body of ideas that is the raw material of thought. Business minds have adapted the idea of input to their own processes. The result is a truly profound maxim that defines just about everything. It goes like this: ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Here’s an example of how it works…
A child is set down in front of the television and expected to entertain itself with ‘kiddie’ programmes. The first show on the box is a classic child’s cartoon featuring a rodent and a cat navigating their differences. As a result the child begins to draw the conclusion that violence is a solution. The second show features a bunch of radioactive mutants beating up on a very two-dimensional bad guy. The kid now knows how to respond when one of its little friends takes a sought-after toy.
Extending this logic into later life yields even more frightening results. Consider the sophomoric dramas that masquerade as sit-com. If it weren’t for the laugh tracks or the audience cues, we might take them seriously. Now consider the depth of arguments paraded on most newscasts to justify diplomatic initiatives with a side order of tanks and airborne cavalry. See what I mean?
Thanks to television, everyone believes just about everything and nobody thinks too hard about what’s going on around them. They don’t have to. Television does it for them. True television addicts will argue that a lot of productive thought can be squeezed into an ad break, but channel surfing has put paid to that.
Can television be educational? Possibly, but there is no true element of thought in absorbing facts put forward on documentary channels. You don’t have to put two and two together if reliable sources tell you it is four.
My new year’s resolution is to rely less on what I am told and figure things out for myself. Share the pleasure. Turn the TV off.
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