Oracle Online

It is alive. The utter ignorance that can be found on every channel has a naĢve charm, like a precocious infant saying the ABCs backward while simultaneously soiling his diaper. But there are purposes to television’s existence.For one, television offers us the opportunity to assess our collective social advancement through a foolproof medium.

In other words, we only have to turn it on to see how stupid we are.

Of course, I would never apply that identity to myself.Now, who wants to watch Amish in the City? When that is over, we can watch CourtTV and stare in morbid excitement as cops cuff perverts for soliciting undercover female cops.

We are all drawn into television’s prurient delights.Show me a person who has not watched Monday
Night Football just to make fun of John Madden.(As an aside, Mr. Madden has actually been certified by leading brain doctors as clinically stupid.)

Show me someone who can go the full hour of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer without switching to see a snippet of another show, usually something naughty, scintillating, like programming from our friends at
Fox “The Fun-Maker” News.

Hell, as my roommates can attest to, I watch the same commercials over and over and make the same criticisms over and over.

But I just ... can’t ... seem ... to ... turn ... it ... off.

Of course, I am also convinced that every truck/SUV commercial is a thinly veiled sexual innuendo aimed at insecure men. Gee, I hope this belief and my inability to eschew television are not connected.

I digress.

I know someone who did a 30-day fast to, as he called it, end television.He was successful. Successful in surviving, that is.

The problem with his noble struggle that ultimately spelled the plan’s failurečaside from its idiocyčwas that he did not tell anybody why he was fasting.We are still unclear if anybody knew that he was fasting at all. But, unaware though he was, television had a hold on him, too: HeMan and the Masters of the Universe must have taught him that he could achieve anything.

See the lies of this devil-box? See the pain that it causes the foolhardy? See the, see the ... see ...

Hmm. HeMan made me think of the dope toys they used to have for Ninja Turtlesčnow that show was truly tubular.

Again, I digress.

There is indescribable thrill in letting television whisk me away to a place foreign to my sensibilities. It is on this alternate plane, untouched by quantum logic, where we frolic with Kramer, play Canasta with the Golden Girls, eat out with the Iron Chef, and kick the living daylights out of the whole cast of Everybody
Loves Raymond.

I need television.

Television fascinates me: I love to hate it. And, while hating it, I have to have it. I am drawn to its ethereal glow, wrapped warmly in the security of its sensory blanket. It is my nemesis, my companion, my Bathsheba, my Jezebel: Try as I might, I cannot escape its charms. The only genuine answer is this: Toss me the remote.