Cable Television

Since getting cable again for the first time in about 15 years, less than two years ago, I've made a running joke about being grateful for my Roku box ... but, the fact is, cable seems to have a special place in the dumbification of our society.  The internet and broadcast are hardly great examples, and reality TV crosses boundaries - but cable generates some of the most shockingly stupid programming it is quite literally terrifying.  In this case, we have two documentaries about mermaids being real.  Why does that matter?  Read the link.

It's not just science, but our society and communities themselves under fire.  For every Housewife (and there are SIX of those series), there's an unmarried person babbling about "connections" and "this journey" under the pretense that game shows can end in "lurve."  And it's not just content; the sponsors have turned me into a middle-aged suburbanite who can't poop without resenting Jamie Lee Curtis and the massive conspiracy to get my obsessed with my own eliminations, losing weight, and an industry of food products designed to promise weight loss (because that is the only worthy goal for a woman) and simultaneously designed to hew precisely to exactly the poor diet issues which have brought my country in the space of half a generation to ownership of the fattest and most risk-ridden bodies in the whole of history.

There is a shrillness in the politics, in the morality, in the gender roles, in the rather overwhelming presence of alcohol in places it will create the most televise-able drama, which goes beyond the anti-science foolery of Animal Planet, Bravo, History, and what have you.  It goes into our PEOPLE, and that is sickening.  When I tell people I earned every minute of my age, I'm simultaneously blessing it.  With age, I've come to a more critical view of the world (even than I trouble to express in this largely non-critical/analytical blog), but a very real gratitude for the fact that I missed out on the rampant opportunities to whore my very "life" out for money in order to entertain and confirm the self-superiority of millions of Cheeto-snarfing strangers.  Because I certainly would have wanted to.  Impossible not to be concerned about the psychological fates of not only those who do it, but the susceptibility of those who consume this from early ages.

But the central problem is the willful ignorance cable so successfully fosters.  Believing in mermaids, but disbelieving climate change.  Taking talking heads of no credible expertise at face value, especially when they are popularly and entertainingly barking mean things about proven science, economics, what have you.  "Fairy tale" gender roles, self-defeating politics, incendiary anger directed not at oppressors, but at those who are different.  Bread.  Circus.

The older I get the more I realize I don't even know how to question our society properly or to any effect.  And the more I see that needs to not only be questioned - but changed.