TV or not TV

In my opinion television in America has always been propaganda. I’m not sure it could be otherwise.

For 3 million years, through increasingly complex iterations, genus Homo received nothing but absolute reality through our eyes. There’s no wiring in there to doubt our eyes. Eyes and ears.

Before TV we got radio. I’ve often wondered if Hitler could have been what he was without radio. The Rwandan genocide was created on the radio. TV trumps it all, though. We see it, we hear it, and it goes into our brains whether we think it does or not.

I was among the first generation to grow up with TV, the last born before it. My parents bought our first TV the year I went into kindergarten (in well funded public schools). I rushed home from 1st grade to see Howdy Doody. I watched 1930s-era cartoons on Saturday mornings. Black and white TV wasn’t primitive, it was a miracle.

Before Rick Nelson (remember him?) was a rock’n’roll star he was Ricky, David’s kid brother on Ozzie and Harriett. At first I was as captivated as everybody else in the family.

Then I was uncomfortable. A lot of TV humor is based on humiliation. Lucy was going to do something stupid. Again. And I was Lucy. I was an awkward kid. I knew how she was going to feel. I remember running from the TV room so I didn’t have to see her be made a fool of.

Reading is different. Reading is, I see the words, the words tell me a story. I can see the story happening in my mind, but it’s coming as words. For all 3 million years our fellow naked apes were always willing to pull one over on us, so we’ve got wiring to doubt the stories we hear in words. But when it came as images of real people walking around in front of my eyes, I couldn’t properly disassociate. I was conscious of it.

In my last year in grade school I was a latchkey kid. I’d walk home for lunch and watch As The World Turns, an early soap. In my city in those years, kids went to their neighborhood high school when they entered 8th grade, and my lunchtime TV habit was broken by force. Cold turkey.

The following year or two I watched less and less TV. My dad and I would gather to watch Rocky and his Friends, just as we’d compete for who got the Mad Magazine first. We watched Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. I’d join the family to watch Bonanza or Gunsmoke. My dad liked Have Gun, Will Travel, but I always though it was kinda grim. Mostly, though, TV bugged me. I wasn’t comfortable. I didn’t like the feeling of all that bullshit running into my brain. More and more often I went outside, or went into my bedroom and read.

By the time I was in mid high school, I rarely watched TV. About the same time I started to notice that I was weird. Somebody would say something on a sitcom, and Monday morning at school I’d hear it 57 times before first hour. I had no clue. I had no referent. At first it caught me off, but pretty soon I realized. TV had taught some new phrase to every teenager in the continental United States except a bunch of Amish kids and me.

In those years I didn’t even know Amish kids existed. I was a 1963 urban sixteen year old. I didn’t have any significant interests in the world except girls and cars. Aside from that I was weird. I didn’t watch TV. Mostly I couldn’t even converse with my classmates. I spent my spare time in the woods, they spent theirs on TV. We didn’t have a common reference point except the drag strip and English class.

I have never seen the twin towers fall. I have never seen George Floyd die. I have never seen any televised murder. I have seen real people die in a real war including one at my own hand. I don’t need any extras in there.

I would later find out that various religious Old Orders, often erroneously known in mass as the Amish, specifically limit the information they allow into their minds. I do too. I don’t adhere to their religion and, from long close association, see many of their flaws with blinding clarity. At the same time I see wisdom in decisions they have made. Perhaps it’s not wisdom, it’s serendipity. Either way, there are good points.

I quit watching TV intentionally, as a specific life decision, after I got home from my war at the age of 21. I am now 79. I have spent the past 58 years of my life without very little information coming through any eyes-and-ears video form into my mind. As I said, I have never seen the twin towers fall. I have never seen a religious fanatic behead a human. I have never seen bloody infants in destroyed buildings.

I know all these events happened. I am aware of them. I read voraciously. I am outraged and disgusted at the genocides going on in Gaza and around the world. Seeing bloody dead babies would not increase my disgust, but it would damage my spirit in ways I could not fully heal. I don’t need to see all the ugly in the world. The ugly right around us has sufficed for my ancestors for 3 million years and it is fully sufficient for me.

More subtle, though, is the propaganda in TV entertainment. Americans learned how to be kids from TV. We watched American Bandstand. Dick Clark taught us how to be proper white kids. Soul Train widened our horizons. Friday night in the high school gym we all knew the newest dance. They taught us to dance without touching each other.

Years later Wes Jackson on the Land Institute would teach me a different dance. I learned to dance in a barn full of others, men and women, youngsters and old folks, touching, releasing, seeing, focusing, moving on, in ways that Dick Clark and middle class American white kids never imagined existed.

Today I live at the far end of sixty years without TV. I live as a free radical inside a society which once all watched the same three channels, all learned the same dances and the same new put-downs, heard the same news and saw the same bloody footage. Later, after Powell and Murdoch and 400 channels, after streaming and cable news, Americans learned one of two opposite packages. Reality vanished into the sparkling video. One oligarchy funds two apparently opposing packages.

There aren’t any donkeys on those packages. There aren’t any pedestrians. There aren’t any grass houses, no villages, no smaller, no slower, no less. The whole thing is funded by More Stuff Incorporated. The advertising industry is the richest industry in the world, the richest men the ones who tell the lies and send them out on billions, trillions, quadrillions of joules over wires and RF.

Virtually every person in the developed world grows up learning that the life I lead is impossible. Virtually all of them have been told since infancy that only fast motion and bright lights keep them alive. Virtually all have seen with their own eyes living proof that courtesy and serenity have no social value. They have learned that nothing is good enough as it is. The people of the developed world have learned, all together, all in the same classrooms, through their own eyes in their own homes, that shoes can’t be useful, they have to be awesome.

Every minute of every program enacts the social norm the people of the developed world learn. Children don’t learn to interact with each other in the town square, they learn from the TV, the tablet, the computer. Some adult wrote every line. Every line had to be consistent with a world where everything worth having came from a store and had a price tag on it.

I see it in my replies. Everybody in the whole developed world grew up in the world that TV producers were showing in their formative years. People say, “You know, it’s like that commercial where…”

I never saw it. I grew up in the woods. In Kansas City, Missouri.