No tv and Manners - essay

I have finally reached the point where I no longer watch tv. Oh, I watch Democracy Now and an occasional sporting event like the Kentucky Derby or the Masters but that's about all these days. I mean, after all, what is the point? There is no real news unless you confuse real news with the never-ending Michael Jackson fiasco, or the Britney pregnancy, or a Bush speech. Also, although I haven't actually kept track of it, I would bet that the amount of time dedicated to commercials has grown significantly over the years. If you were to turn on your tv randomly throughout the day and night I bet there would be a 50-50 chance you would get a commercial instead of anything else (you almost certainly would not get news).

The commercials have grown even more aggravating than previously. Some of them seem to have been running since time immemorial. These long running commercials - do they continue them seemingly forever because they are so successful or because they are too cheap to pay for new ones? They are so maddening that you reach the point where you turn off the set rather than listen to them for the umpteenth thousand time. Better to just stop watching tv than having to deal with the problem. Then there are the occasions when they show you the same commercial two or three times in a row. I guess the stations are committed to showing them so many times and if they get out of sync they just double them up. If I were paying for it I'd be pretty upset. And I have said nothing about how offensive many of them are. Take, for example, the question of manners as brought to us by tv:


I am not prepared to discuss manners as brought to us by television in general, that is, on talk shows, soap operas, situation comedies, and so on. Indeed, I suspect there are no manners revealed at all on such programs. This is a topic far too large for me to deal with in anything less than book form. Here I wish only to reflect on some recent advertisments that have been running on TV of late, mostly hotel ads.
One of these shows a tennis court net stretched across a large living space. A tennis ball is going back and forth as if someone in the room is actually playing tennis. The idea behind this I suppose is to illustrate just how spacious the rooms are in this particular hotel. The ad also implies that you are free to do anything you wish when staying in one of these hotels. Would hotels truly want their customers playing tennis in their rooms? I think not. It would be exceedingly bad form to say the least.
Still another hotel ad features three small children jumping up and down on one of the queen sized beds. They are obviously enjoying themselves immensely. I guess I am very old fashioned as I was never allowed to engage in this behavior, it being explained to me at an early age that not only did this tend to ruin the beds but also disturbed the people next door and down below. Again, I ask, do hotels really encourage children to behave in such an ill mannerly fashion? Are they that desperate for business?
But this is not all. In still another hotel ad a grown man is shown holding a bag of frozen peas, sort of dancing around, while hurling individual peas at a pan on a burner. He is apparently pretending to shoot baskets as one would do on a basketball court. Finally he spins around and falls down. The message is supposed to be again, I guess, that in one of their suites you are free to do as you wish. I guess the chambermaids clean up the peas that end up all over the stove and the floor. While this might be great fun for a five or six year old it strikes me as inordinately stupid for a grown man, to say nothing of ill-mannered.
Away from hotels now, there is a somewhat similar ad going around which has to do, I think, with a credit card. A handsome looking young lady has apparently used her credit card to buy and furnish what appears to be a rather plush apartment or house. She is obviously very proud of herself and, while dressed in a rather chic outfit featuring leather pants is talking to her friends on the phone while jumping up and down on her new expensive leather furniture. I shudder to think what my mother would have thought of such atrocious behavior.
This says nothing of the countless scenes one sees on TV of people eating and talking with their mouths full, making as much noise as possible pigging down potato chips, hamburgers, tacos and other such things, ads designed presumably to make you want their products. These ads assume, as near as I can tell, that Americans all eat like hogs and wish to emulate these uncouth disgusting manners. Do you suppose the creators of these ads eat and behave in these ways? Do they not know better? Or do they just have so much contempt of the rest of us that anything goes?
Some decry the increasing lack of manners in American culture. Some even to the point, apparently, of offering classes once again in etiquette. I fear that unless students in these classes are forbidden TV it will simply be a lost cause. Who needs manners anyway when you can have such a good time flaunting them daily.