what I'm missing

Over Thanksgiving, I took time to watch some TV, something I rarely do. I did this in part because I was invited to by my host, who wanted to kill some time before our feast of turkey and gravy and butternut squash, and in part to see what life is like for the tens of millions of average Americans who make it their habit. As part of my efforts to make myself a better and wiser person, I have been reading books on a wide range of topics and generally avoiding wasteful and IQ-diminishing activities such as the mindless consumption of packaged content, so I was excited to run with the crowd for a moment and check out what TV had to offer. My host and I watched a show about tattoo artists competing to see who could perform best under pressure, best on camera, best before a panel of judges. Thankfully, the show had been taped, so we could fast-forward over the commercials; thankfully, dinner was served before any of us had to suffer through too much of it.

Since taking the first steps toward self-sufficiency by running most of my household from a bank of 4 deep-cycle marine batteries fed by 6 solar panels, I have restricted my personal viewing time to but a few hours a week – I hook up the 750 watt inverter to watch only one movie at a time, whereupon I detach it from the battery, thus shutting everything down. I do not veg regularly on the couch flipping through channels; I follow neither show nor series, episode nor finale, nor do I bring up watching TV in conversation or stick around if someone else does. In short, at the mere mention of television, I become a butt-hurt curmudgeon. And so I was shocked at how stressful watching the boob-tube has become, how stupid I felt afterward, and how many more commercials there seemed to be now than when I watched it regularly just a few years ago. It is as if producers, studios, and networks had baited the viewing public into watching compelling and interesting shows and then switched formats to reflect their ultimate goal, that being to trick the American people into thinking they were having fun when they were in actuality being force-fed one advertisement after the next in bewilderingly frequent intervals, minds rotting while waist-lines expanded, ambition draining away while creativity was crushed under the jack-boot of rerun content.

Before this thankfully brief exposure, I had begun to wonder if I was missing something important, if I had erred in canceling my cable TV service, if I were somehow worse off for swimming against the crowd by not succumbing to TV's mind-numbing allure. Today, however, my curiosity is stilled, my wonder has abated, and I am confident in one thing: I am better off for having avoided television these past few years. As a person who has glimpsed the eternal silence of the Great Vast Crushing Nothingness and lived to tell the tale, I have a decent understanding of the preciousness of human existence; therefore, my decision to try to better myself as a person, as a scholar, as a linguist, and as a writer rather than waste my short life glued to a self-illuminated, talking rectangle appears to be bearing fruit, if only slowly. By no amount of talking, warning, cajoling, begging, demanding, nagging, or urging will I ever convince anyone else whom I care about to join me in ceasing to watch TV, in preserving a shred of self-respect and personal dignity, or in saving the self by switching off the tube; all forms of salvation – even ones that are so simply accomplished – come from the realization that there are always better ways than the current path, that nothing worth its while is easy, and that the hardest things are the most rewarding. So, please, cancel your cable subscriptions, dust off a book, and start living well again. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp