Turn it off!

I was glad to be home to see it.
He came from his room, a mini flashlight clutched to his mouth, vaguely singing along with Bonnie Raitt on the TV.

Robbie Robertson was the soundtrack to his birth, to date the most intense time he and I have had in a jacuzzi. I was wondering if he had made some great, mystical, musically collaborative cosmic connection: Bonnie Raitt, John Hiatt, The Band, Robbie Robertson, or perhaps the reverse?
I was trying to imagine exactly what he might have been thinking when for the first time, two-year-old GabeBabe imitated TV.
Who was he imagining himself to be? Mick Jagger? Bono?
Britney Wolfowitz?

Suddenly, he became a gangster.
He pulled his bright red beanie over his head, staggered out the door and fell over the step. Dharma the Jack Russel hit him like a bullet and kept him nailed to the floor until backup arrived.

We had so happily lived without TV for several years, but we had recently capitulated and for better or worse now had a TV in the front room. Was its insiduous effect beginning to already have an effect, I wondered?

Later when LaPrincessa suggested that the microphone scene might be from his real world, I had to concede that she was most probably correct; we have musician friends. He has seen many vocalists in his few years.
“As for the gangster” she said, rolling her eyes at me, “that could have its origin in the innocence of first realising that sometimes you can see without apparently being seen. Maybe you have been watching too much TV?”
Candy-apple red knitted wool as camo netting! I wondered why I hadn't thought of it myself...

Admittedly, Britney and the Gangster had more than likely come from my own TV-addled imagination.
There had been rather a lot of TV lately, but since CWC was over I was quite happy for the box to be dead.
Too much bad light...

An interesting book I read about 25 years ago was “Five Arguments for the Elimination of Television” by Gerry Mander, all thanks to the College Library and Cape Provincial Administration.
I came across a .pdf synopsis of it somewwwhere more recently, and found his arguments to be as valid now as they were then, if not more so.

One such argument made mention of the inability to critically filter high volumes of incoming information. It is a real issue. The brain recieves far more data than it can ever process. Simultaneous audio and video is too much to critically process at one time. Irritation soon follows.
Regaining a sense of calm requires a shutdown of the thinking part of the brain, in effect making the brain a simple sponge for absorbing uncritically whatever the sponsors of the signal want us to absorb.
Like lambs to the slaughter we go, but armed with the name of the right mint sauce to sweeten the ride.

In the very early days of television in this country, there were test patterns and programming of a hideous sort; all Carike Kreuzenkamp and Ge Korsten.
Then came television advertising.
The first TV ad in South Africa used a cowboy to sell frozen burger patties, surely an unwitting yet ominous portent of the level to which our collective brains would ultimately descend; a frozen splodge of over-processed fat, cereal and sweepings off the abattoir floor hypnotically mesmerised by endless gunplay.
I understood then that the idea of advertising was to pay for better programming for the benefit of the viewers. Around the time TV advertising began we got Dallas.

Nowadays it seems as if the programming is chosen purely as a vehicle to attract viewers for the benefit of the advertisers; Big Brother as Judas Goat, sms's charged at R5.
And still we have Dallas.

TV is somehow always here, there and everywhere.
It lurks behind a multitude of tensions, witness how many remotes get chewed by dogs.
TV forms a backtrack to every milestone, for families and for the entire species.
What would 9/11 have been without CNN?

Its massive black eye stares darkly at the room in silent begging for someone to switch it on and give it life and colour, that it too might be a part of the conversation. When we dumbly aquiesce it feigns conviviality with monosyllabic grunts, tweaky shrieks and canned laughter, destroying repartee and giving us “oh... my.... Gaaaawd...!” in its place.
Why else could we possibly need an Oprah to talk for us to us, if only to remind us that we are after all human and being human is not only the best part of being here on this planet, but perhaps the most important part.

When you do not have TV, there is no argument.
People read, play, practise, teach. Remember hobbies? Conversations with real listening? Chess?
Down here are G7 and F# , up there are Betelgeuse and The Great Nebula. Big Brother is Dan.
Without TV one realises there is never a real need for whatever the minds behind demand creation decide should be on special, and an adequate mint sauce can probably be made with chopped fresh mint, vinegar and sugar.
Cricket commentary is available ball-by-ball on FM, and decent news broadcasts available on BBC-Africa on AM.
There is no need to miss out on anything important, least of all each other.

When you do not have TV, watching TV means going to some high ground nearby to watch whole suburbs flicker and flash in synchronised dull blue like different sections of a great orchestra, whilst car thieves conspirationally nod silent greetings as they pass.
That is really watching TV!

As real stars endlessly twinkle their timeless, silent witness to our collective histories in the celestial heavens above, a civilisation hides itself in figurative darkness below, contentedly watching fake pretenders over-enthusiastically endorsing all the useless accoutrements to a plastic heaven here on Earth.
You too can have it all right now, if you just call the number on the screen.
But that's not all...

It is as simple and ridiculous as that. How long yet before we can, in agreement, be rid of it?