January 2010 Archives

I was about to write the words, "Nothing shocks me on television anymore" when I realized that if that was true I wouldn't be writing this. Incrementally over the years, like a lobster placed in a pot of cool water that doesn't notice the increasing temperature from the stove, we haven't leaped or clawed our way out of the pot as much as simmered drowsily in its deadening heat. We've accepted without protest the most recent public spectacle of network TV's treatment of Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, two richly rewarded good guys in a sea of counterfeit crap peddlers, who have been forced to cannibalize each other publicly. Try to imagine Johnny Carson in a similar position.

And this is what television does to its multi-million dollar stars. But I'm not talking about the business of television -- the insipid reality shows, the mind numbing repetitious local news programs that seemingly have less to say the more hours they are permitted each day to broadcast weather, traffic reports and recent crime. I'm talking abot the whole package. The effect it's having on the way we think, or perhaps the way we once thought we thought.

For instance, imagine how many advertisements we see everyday for patent medicines in which the bulk of the commercial warns of us of the possible side effects -- up to and including "in rare instances" death -- while showing happy people enjoying fulfilling lives, sometimes in seperate bathtubs, with the same happy theme music playing in the background throughout. We've become lobsters who don't even notice our bathtubs are side by side and outdoors. Who can believe a word these commercials utter? Who cares?

Evidently they work because television does not reward failure. Or, for the matter, successful past performance (see Jay, Conan, above). What television does reward, apprently, is dead performance. Months after loud-talking bearded huckster Billy Mays' death, he's still shouting about miracle products that rub, rub, voila! Scratches gone, stains gone, life gone. Who cares? Only the Sham Wow Guy knows.

So in the midst of such daily dreck what could have captured my attention to have me declare that I was "shocked" by what I saw? What gave me that Extra push? It was the obscene juxtaposition of Haiti's devastation and Heidie's reconstruction, a full hour of intense coverage of the Port Au Prince corpeses by a sunburned and genuinily bewildered Brian Williams, a guy whose eyes you take to be your own, and to see that look in Brian Williams eyes was to see George Orwell eying Burma and the elephant. Followed immediately by an Extra Extra report about the cosmetic surgery visited upon Heidie's boobs bust belly naval nip tuck what the luck.

Somehow I found it obscene in a great gulp of shame that this is what television is capable of. To follow the devastation of Haiti seamlessly with a report on excessive elective surgery options executed by the most beautiful women on earth who can't stand the sight of herself.

Oh Haiti. Heidie, Heidie, Heidie. . .

 YOU HAVE TO "GET" THE MUMMERS to get Philadelphia. I don't mean you have to "like" the Mummers or "enjoy" the Mummers or even "approve" of the Mummers. You just have to understand the reason why there's a Mummers Parade in Philadelphia every New Year's Day rather than in any other city on earth. The Mummers are like a magic act you've seen a thousand times and yet you can't explain the trick. It's a sleight of hand with both hands in plain sight . There is no artful deception; the crafty illusion of the Mummers Parade lies in its utter sincerity. You couldn't make this stuff up. And if someone tried it would come off as falsely fanciful and make believe as a Disney or a Six Flags or a Starbucks on Two Street.

Philadelphia's Mummers Parade isn't an ancient solstice festival or a defiant ethnic rite of celebration or a tourist-friendly civic marketing opportunity so much as this city's historically predictable obsessive compulsive disorder. Mummers. Where did these guys come from? The centuries of fat and lean years have changed their traditional chant, "Give us whiskey, give us gin, give us Broad Street, let us in. Give us millions or if not, we'll strut and dance for free nonstop." If the NFL Players Association operated like the Mummers, the Superbowl would be aired on public television. Like the internet, nobody has discovered how  to make money on the Mummers. The days of local TV stations offering million dollar contracts to air the parade are long gone.

Think of it. In the year 2010 the Mummers had to pay $150,000 to march in the city of Philadelphia on New Year's Day. We all know why; the recession, police overtime, yadda-yadda-yadda. We all know that the "prize money" awarded by the city to the winning clubs over the years has been a gesture compared to the actual financial cost, both to the individual and the organization, of being a Mummer. Well, boo-freakin'-hoo, Mr. and Mrs. Mummer (and as I write those words I think of a string band captain in Port Richmond decades ago named Richard, whose nickname was "Big Dick", which was printed on the back of his club jacket as he sat on a barstool in the clubhouse next to his wife, who wore a mummers' club jacket identifying her as "Mrs. Big Dick."). The Mummers have survived worse times than these -- world wars, the Great Depression, Wilson Goode -- and they continue to be "this thing of ours", Philadelphia's "la cosa nostra," a New Year's parade you can't refuse.