I watch TV. I can't help it, I'm an American. The flickering, radiant god of primetime shows me such wonderful things – it shows me cars and minivans and toasters and sitcoms and inspiring messages from our president that fill me with patriotism and a fervent desire to obey the will of Congress and to love oil companies; it gives me Friends and allows me to live vicariously through the fake lives of real people just like me, except they're not sitting at home on their monstrously obese asses (made in the U.S. of A., dammit!) eating potato chips and drinking beer and farting into their lovingly upholstered sofas. No, they're out in Australia or Africa or where ever, trying to survive the harsh conditions in their Gap clothing and Reebok sneakers. I believe the propaganda of the government, because George W. Bush is like a Big Brother to this nation, watching over us in our time of strife.
The TV is a beautiful creation. Its prismatic messages bring happiness to my gelid pizza-and-pretzel-stuffed soul and joy to my oppressed proletariat home. It is my Pavlov's Bell – when it turns on, I drool. I sit there in my achromatic bubble of artificially induced Nirvana, salivating endlessly upon my Abercrombie and Fitch flannel shirt while photons stream past my cornea, becoming lodged in my aqueous humour, eventually disgorging their contents into my cerebellum through a network of slogan congested nerves. Dendrites have been replaced by ad campaigns, "You're not fully clean 'til you're ... at JC Penny's ... where a kid can be ... two scoops ahead!" Do you recognize all of those? If you're Sure, raise both your arms. I am a victim of popular culture – not a culture chosen by the masses and evolved from the will of the majority, but a culture defined by marketing executives and poorly written crime dramas. Brittney Spears sings for Pepsi, or maybe Coca-Cola – they're the same, really, except on campus. I don't read the newspaper; everything I need to know is told to me by the local news stations. ABC. NBC. CBS. Fox. They all have exactly the same stories, except for the happy-go-lucky "Bright Spot" story that focuses on something good in the city, because it's a rare enough occurrence that it's newsworthy. I believe what Oprah tells me, and Jerry Springer's Final Thought rings true in my ears.
Even my sex drive has been reduced to a shriveled shadow of its former self by the more-addicting-than-heroin West Wing reruns that have restored my faith in the ability of Martin Sheen to govern our fair nation. I no longer care about my social life, except when I invite friends over to watch football being played a hundred or a thousand miles away by people I could never hope to meet and earn more in a day than what I make in a year. Sure, I could go watch the football games at the local high school or college, but those are people I might get to know – I don't want their autographs. They're just humans, like me.
Why do I do this? you ask. Why do I wallow endlessly in the desert of potato chip crumbs and empty cans of beer (as inconspicuous as sex appeal in advertisements) that I have created about myself? Is it merely because, like Bree Sharp and her bitterly blissful siren's voice, I am destined to wait eternally in the sands of Nevada until my David Duchovny arrives to love me?
Maybe I want to be the 90% of people who don't think and just accept what is told to them, because it's easier than dealing with the world and it's hard to be responsible for a life, especially if it's mine, so I live vicariously through a million other people who make their own decisions for someone else while my church-government-teacher-father-friend-God-television makes my own decisions for me. Yes, I am a sheep, and cable is my shepherd, tending to its flock of mindless, bleating souls with more love and affection than God. Complacency is the crook with which it guides me and Materialism is the rifle with which it protects me from the twin wolves: Individuality and Independent Thought. My philosophies are born from the Aristotelian dialogues in Seinfeld reruns and Sportscenter (Craig Kilborn was too good for them, anyway), and I refuse to apply them to my pathetic existence. Philosophy is purely an academic study and has no bearing on me – I do not care what truth is because Austin Powers has provided me with all the profundity I can digest without getting mental constipation. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the intellectual fiber that keeps the colon of my cerebellum regular against the constant onslaught of greasy Lifetime specials and the Garbage PlateTM that is 7th Heaven.
Yes, this is enough to keep me happy, docile, and placated in the face of countless irrelevancies better than actual social interaction ever could. I will break engagements because I refuse to miss a single episode of Survivor 4: the World, and I can carry on hours of conversation about Touched by an Angel but will flee from anyone who makes a reference to Atlas Shrugged. I don't fucking care who John Galt is, and I believe the reports about Rearden Metal, dammit! The only literary references worth making to me are about the Bible, but only the most important parts, like about Santa Claus giving myrrh to kids for the first Christmas and that part about the guy getting nailed to a tree, or something like that. If you mention Elijah I'll assume you're talking about the actor and then ask you why you keep setting a place for him at dinner. Ezekial Stone and Frank Black made too many obscure references for my taste, and so I got their shows taken off the air – there wasn't enough superficiality in them to keep me interested through the endless dialogue with vocabularies equivalent to a twelfth grade level (which is four levels higher than the newspapers I don't read because the plot is too complex).
Give me the cliché plot devices of Just Shoot Me – except for that episode about King Lear, which I changed the channel for – and the vapid conversation of Everybody Loves Raymond and the shouting announcers that barbarically yawp the virtues of Toyota and Honda and Ford through the roofs of every household in the world. Give me the scantily clad models in perfume and jewelry commercials and the nauseating sentimentality of daytime talk shows. Give me the artificial narcolepsy that is the PGA Tour, and give me women's tennis – oh, so short skirts and effortful, feminine grunts. Give me trailers for movies like Rush Hour 5 and Scary Movie 3 and A Night at the Roxbury that reveal the plot and all of the jokes so I don't actually have to leave my hole – filled with America's goodies – and interact with the robots and cabbages pretending to be humans as they sell tickets and overpriced popcorn.
Give me all of this, because I'm an American, and I need to get laid.

12/16/2001

Posted on 12/16/2001
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