In April of 1996, I finally came to terms with my addiction. What is interesting about addictions, and mine in particular, is that they have the singular distinction among psychological ailments as something that both satiates and destroys its captive. My addiction was one I could satisfy quite easily at any point during an at-home day. In bed, in my chair, while eating, while reading, while writing, while dozing, while THINKING I could indulge my desire -- just as long as I remained undisturbed and was given quietude. (By the bye, for those who maintain a pious frame of mind, I did not abandon myself to unabashed prayer or worship. And for those whose minds rest in a less-than-decent state, I did not participate in the "fleshy form" of self-gratification.)
I was addicted to television. It was no surprise that I should have found myself in such a state. After years of learning network schedules, show theme songs, character (and actor) names, show settings and plots, that I should look in the mirror and see a TV junkie should not have been shocking. But I was shocked.
I was shocked because every adult and every person "who knew" told me that television was intellectually unstimulating, uneducational, and basically, a glowing, boxed-in conglomeration of ethnically diverse baby-sitters. I was shocked because television was something that was not meant to stimulate imagination but deaden it, as years of walking across hot coals deadens one's feet to the pain. In short, I was shocked because the prevailing mentality was that television was not an electronic window into the greater world but a view to a void.
You skeptics may ask if I've found otherwise. I have.
No other medium captures the human experience and delivers it to the masses, as does television. No other medium transmits happenings around the world and delivers those happenings in the form of drama, comedy, and/or news (or documentary). Recent examples include the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the death of Princess Diana, the rise and fall and rise and fall of Mike Tyson, and the trial of Mr. O.J. Simpson. Without television, we could not have watched the Gulf War while supping. If television had not been invented, we would not have witnessed the "incident" at Tiananemen Square as it happened. We would not have had the opportunity to sit through Diana's funeral and be subject to the onslaught of worldwide grief in the wake of her death. We could not have viewed victims of the "incident" at Chernobyl. We would not have had to speculate as to whether or not Dr. King knew he would be assassinated as he orated his "I've been to the mountaintop" speech. And last but not least, we would not have beheld a President who -- in one year -- vehemently argued his innocence, then his guilt, and then his contrition. And we cannot forget the biographies and documentaries that have documented the first 6,000 years of civilization before television.
My point is that television, to an extent, conveys humanity. While we do not get the smells and the touch of the actual events, we get ideas. We learn cultural notions. We learn how to laugh. We learn what is contemporarily funny and what is not. We learn how to cry. We learn, for example, that muscular dystrophy is the current disease of sympathy and that AIDS is a close second. We learn that East Timorese are currently being oppressed. We learn that the war in Kosovo is over and that no more people are being killed and that everyone there is happy. We learn that people in Somalia have either all died or finally gotten relief supplies. We learn that Hitler and his henchmen are probably dead and that they died miserable deaths. We learn that Cleopatra was not black but Greek. In short, we learn things that otherwise would not have been widely known.
What does all this prove? Television conveys the fact that humanity -- our collective conscious -- has the biggest case of Attention Deficit Disorder ever known. We do not pay attention to anything for very long. Our opinions of the famous fluctuate. Our opinion of the deadliest disease changes daily. (Yesterday is was cancer. Today it is AIDS. Tomorrow it will be Ebola.) Yesterday, my favorite musical group was The Cranberries. Today it is Sixpence None the Richer. Tomorrow I will reject the work of both as too old and stale and reflective of my more ignorant days.
