January 2004

My Prolonged No-Cable Tee-Vee Experiment

The wife and I continue to live without cable tee-vee in the house. I can insist that it's for our own good, and she tends to agree with me, but it creates a void in our life. She likes the cable, remembers it fondly, mostly because our tee-vee does not pick up many decent stations. We get three NJN's, two spanish, one indian, one God, and UPN. That may sound like eight, but it's really only one and a half. Despite all that mess, I continue to hold firm. I think we are going to survive.

Why am I so confident? Because I read the Sunday paper. That's why!

I like to peruse the weekly programming schedules in the Sunday paper to catch a glimpse of what I am missing. From what I can tell, I am not missing much. You name the channel, VH1, MTV2, NBC, FoodNetwork, or whoever, they are filled with reruns, reruns, and more reruns. I suppose that on any given night, you cannot find one or two new programs on any of those networks (I'm talking about every night, not just during sweeps.) There's more being repeated (commercials excluded) than being seen for the first time. And if I remember what most new shows are like, there's not too much new content coming out of them either. So I figure that I cannot be missing too much.

Still, what that means is that I am missing some high-quality brain melting. Serious brain destruction. And on top of that, our new smaller apartment makes it harder to avoid the tee-vee if one of us is watching it. Even if I wanted to read a book or listen to the radio, I'd have to do that in the bedroom, and that's no fun at all.

Of course, the presidential campaign will change when we gets tee-vee again. Right now, I get my campaign news on the web or on the radio. I read or hear what they say, I do not see them talking with a ticker running below their visage. Neither do I hear the vapid talking heads try to tell me what the candidate meant. I have a better chance to think for myself.

Today, while driving home from West Virginia, I heard Fox "News" Sunday repeated on C-SPAN. The dude was interviewing John Kerry. Sen. Kerry fielded a long volley of tough questions, giving quite good answers Without the visual distractions, I absorbed what the Senator had to say quite easily. He did a real good job, and made me a bit of a fan. With all the campaign coverage I get on the radio, I wonder how different the campaigns would be. Just thinking.

Politics on the television, with it's unbalanced political slant to the right, turns the coverage of the campaign into a huge, slutty talk radio-style mess. You do not hear about the issues and ideas of the campaign. Sure, we get a few minutes of ideas, but the bulk of the tee-vee coverage spends more time dealing with the rumors and the dirty politics. Sweaters, haircuts and their donors are somehow more important that their actual qualifications (I am not going to mention how tee-vee coverage also goes to great lengths to ignore President Bush's qualifications, or lack thereof.)

After the end of my six-month prohibition from television, I hope that John Edwards will be the Democratic nominee. If we are lucky, people may hear what plans he has for America, but I doubt it.