But you know, it seems so - - well I’ll just say it: it seems so OLD.
As a rank-and-file member of the Baby Boom, just consider how many hours I’ve viddied, oh me brothers. 37,000? 59,000? 100,000 hours of television?
Consider the ocean of bullshit that represents. (Although, I will admit there have been plenty of pretty good commercials.)
But also the window on the world. The promise, the diversity of our living planet and the unpredictable people who’ve pranced and strutted across the viewport.
I’ve loved TV, I admit it. Loved and lost the love, it seems.
It’s just that television doesn’t seem to pack the political punch it once did. There aren’t any oceanic, vast and inspiring TV moments of masses of completely individual people unified for an afternoon to press a single political purpose.
An afternoon or even more – an entire season, a whole year. Of protest. Of demonstration. And what were they/we demonstrating? Rage, Hope, Grief, Determination, Resistance, Dreams, Action, Democracy. And it was all there, naked and gritty, on TV. And I could take part in it, by walking out of the house and into the streets.
Call it nostalgia? TV was my lodestar as I navigated from manchild to man. It was political when political meant natural, cultural, practical – whether the goals were impossible or not.
Nowadays when I read the rundown of Sunday talkshow guests – or should we say political pimps and whores – it means almost nothing to this weary mind. I’m not going to watch any of that tripe on an otherwise glorious morning! Just like I’m rarely going to tune into morning shows, the evening or nightly news.
I watch TV now to go into a beta-state, much like lying on my stomach getting a massage.
Ever since it was invented, we have argued over the promise TV has to affect politics. By 1970 they said it was supposed to short-circuit political party machines and liberate individual politicians to reach directly to individual voters, living room by living room. Yeah, great – it was right about that time that Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart and the rest of that polyester pack of hypocritical curs got their Tee-Vangelical pocketbook-stripmining operations going bigtime.
And what about today? Well, 100,000 hours later I’m not without hope – but that’s mainly because we have this thing: the relatively open-access, net-neutral, free speech zone of the web. This is not the TV the young me fell in love with and later learned to bitterly hate – but it is a direct offspring of TV, and now my hope for my new love is a worldwide love, a more mature one, a skeptical love.
That hope is this: that there are enough of us moody but clear-thinking, practical idealists taking enough action to not lose the net to the same flatulent deity of profit that bound and gobbled up my first love, TV.
If we can keep the net as free as it now is, then maybe we can deliver politics from the zombidizing shape it’s in – partly due to 60 years of television.