Watching TV

I don't know what to make of the absoluely bizarre world of television. I'm not a big television watcher but of course I watch some things. During the course of a week I usually watch The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I watch Keith Olberman. During the football season I usually watch part of one game a week (usually the last quarter or so). I never watch basketball or tennis or bowling. I never watch baseball except for the annual championship Little League game (won today by some team from Georgia, beating Japan). Sometimes I watch Iron Chef, only because my wife watches it. That's it. I have followed this pattern pretty faithfully for the past two or three years. I can understand the programs themselves okay, it's the commercials I find utterly bizarre.

If you haven't noticed (but of course you have) the commercials are full of things like cookies driving a car and singing. There are talking and singing animals, like dogs and cats and even cows. There are cars with eyes and mouths that sometimes talk. Today I saw a commercial with eyeballs on someone's foot. There are people dressed up like various chemicals that discuss how they are being reformulated, to say nothing of people dressed up as carrots or pumpkins or other vegetables. In one commercial a cat is shown massaging its owner's shoulders and neck. Still others display owners talking to their dogs about their diets. A recent commercial shows a princess kissing in turn a frog, turkey, orangutan, and then refusing to kiss a centaur. Another shows some guys tormenting a creature I guess is supposed to be bigfoot. There are dancing raisins and talking bees, even dancing peanuts. Talking fish are not out of the question, nor are talking geckos, chameleons, and ducks. Are these absurd images supposed to appeal to the child in all of us? Where did the idea of using talking creatures and grotesque automobiles and such ever originate (don't tell me, I know, in the advertising industry). It is as if they have lifted these absurd ideas out of children's books to feed an adult market. I guess it must be successful because they keep on doing it and the anthropomorphic images continue to grow. Someone should do an in-depth study of this strange American phenomena (perhaps someone has but I am not familiar with it?).

If a person from another universe were to land here on earth and try to understand what was important to U.S. citizens from watching tv they would have to conclude that the most important things at the moment are: (1) losing weight, (2) having erections, (3) talking to their doctors and taking drugs, 4) apearing sexy, and (5) vicarous violence. I swear that for the last two years or so I have not seen one single movie advertisment that did not feature violence. I guess I just don't watch the right programs. Actually, there was one just the other day having something to do with a High School musical that didn't seem to feature violence. Could this be a trend? Not a chance. I have to admit that these commercials, taken in their entirety, represent to me a pretty sick society.

Other things I regard as kind of strange but are commonplace in our society have also to do with commercialism. For example, why do we have to pay for magazines that are mostly full of ads for various products. The people who run the ads have to pay, why should the viewers have to pay also? Shouldn't magazines and newspapers just be given away (in fact, in rare cases they are). And why do car manufacturers, who make their profit on every vehicle they sell, encourage us to buy them on time so they can add interest to their profits as well (and we rather eagerly allow them to do this)? I guess these are really dumb questions for someone who resides in such a capitalistic country. For me, the longer I live in this culture, the more surreal it becomes. It's like living in a culture of the absurd. I think I should have stayed in the New Guinea Highlands, closer to nature and reality. It had its problems but absurdity wasn't one of them.

LKBIQ:
"Politics is the science of how who gets what, when and why."
Sidney Hillman