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A Death in the Family

by JENNIFER BLUE

G21 Staff Writer

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LOS ANGELES - My neighbor,
a spirited seventy-something year old man, tells me that he once put a hammer through a television screen. His eager confession briefly reminds me of a Life of Elvis Presley film wherein the opening scene features the bloated, aging King shooting a television screen with a pistol. My neighbor is prompted to reveal his act of bludgeoning when he views my paramour's brother hauling our own television carcass out of our abode. "My ex-wife...she watched so much TV that it was like living with the living dead," my neighbor says. My neighbor crushed and smashed his competition, but his then-wife didn't appreciate his chivalry--they divorced shortly after the Hammer Incident. Brother-of-paramour heaves our ostracized, circa mid-80's TV set toward a van parked on the street; the set's dangling plug bobs and swings menacingly around the brother's thick shins.

We unplugged the life force of our television as if confronted with a brain dead-parent, sibling or child. We didn't merely perform last rites for the television set within our livingroom, we got radical and severed the umbilical cord of television media from our home. I sometimes regret that my act of refusal lacked the drama and pathos of my neighbor or Elvis Presley; in this epoch outrageousness seems to be the only way to convey one's real or fictional convictions.

Sometimes death is a relief.
You see someone close to you deteriorating yet you can't let go; you begin relying on quackery and false hope to avoid the threatening emptiness. You try to convince yourself that a comatose relative moved their fingers when it was you who moved their fingers. Death is like lopping off an arm or a lobe of the brain; our sense of comfortable identity, real or manufactured, is thrown off-balance.

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American television spiraled into a coma a long time ago. With few exceptions it is a grotesque device of mass manipulation. In this truculent Information Age, sensational diversions are more dense, insistent and despotic. Violent attacks on other nations are stylized like a movie of the week replete with demonic antagonists and false idols. The misery of humanity is trotted out like a freak show so that political agendas may be more readily received and embraced. We believe we are participants in a democratic society as we write our opinions to the op-ed sections of mainstream periodicals, as we channel and parrot the assigned roles in the latest debacle. Nazi propagandist Goebbels knew the power of media; he is snickering in his grave. If you sit quietly you can hear Goebbels snickering; tee hee hee. Mainstream media assigns the topic dujour like a demented school master and then we brawl amongst ourselves within a prison of opinion. Does mainstream media reflect the collective psyche or does mainstream media sculpt the collective psyche?

There are some concerned American citizens who want to regulate, that is Censor, television programming. These concerned citizens are convinced that any entertainment featuring violence spurs acts of real violence in the supposedly real world. Meanwhile the real world has been dressed-up and perfumed like an reluctant debutante. Alas, the painful underside of spurious, amusement park life-styles demand our attention like tragic shots heard round the world. The censor-oriented citizens would like to erase unpleasantness from our sight, but unfortunately real pain is rebellious and not inclined to hide. The more suppressed the dark side of life, the more outrageous the overtures of contrast become. In Los Angeles, Live Police Pursuits! often interrupt regular television programming. In recent history one of the chasee's impetuously blew his head off on Live! Television! Concerned citizens would do better to examine real life instead of amusement.

The New Age Fad would have us believe that by chanting a few affirmations and by attending a couple of Shaman Workshops that we will be able to Heal Our Independent Lives (that is, Adapt). However, consider that if so many people have so many acronymed problems, then perhaps the source of irritation lies outside of ourselves.

I suffer from Media Fatigue.
How special. We all have opportunities to be special with our acronymed dysfunctions; no one can be unduly minimized--it is your right! New mood and mind altering drugs are manufactured faster than the time it takes to smoke a marijuana cigarette or consume a cocktail.

The Media Fatigue Syndrome
has genetic implications, my father is also susceptible to media fatigue. When he reads his mainstream newspapers the temples of his head bulge and boil; he rants in exasperation; my mother goes for a drive or digs trenches in the backyard when a media fatigue eruption is about to occur.

My father knows when he is being manipulated, so do I.