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. . .
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