Every hippie stockbroker and chamomile farmer, every militiaman and starving bohemian has at least one television set today. Ex-cons two weeks out of stir proudly point to a Magnavox with an Aaron Rents sticker on it. Chinese immigrants arriving from a city where only one in four people even has a bathroom will exclaim as they debark not, "Where's the bathroom?" but, "Where do I buy a TV?"
I don't advocate swearing off television entirely, like those Luddites who hurl their sets from the roofs of tall buildings (and whom local stations always cover, with narcissistic splendor, on the evening news). I say give peace a chance. We can all coexist, picture tubes and humans living in harmony; I'd just hate to see my sister marry one.
Hey, my credentials are sound. We have no fewer than three televisions at home, since my mom keeps giving us her geriatric sets as she replaces them with brand-spanking new models for the kitchen counter, the bedroom, the john. So what if they're monochromatic and won't take cable? And yes, it's supposed to have two inches of black margin along the left edge of the screen, thank you very much.
Truly, I'd rather curl up with a bushel of trail mix to watch the 23 minutes of commercials that interlard your average Star Trek rerun than to answer the 23 unsolicited telephone offers that arrive after dinner. Never find fault with drivel, my friend: Drivel makes the world go 'round. If you don't believe me, read the Congressional Record or watch the county council on C-Span.
When I do watch TV, commercials are my favorite part. Only a cad could fail to love those adorable kids who sell tires, life insurance and bathroom tissue-formerly called "toilet paper" until someone realized it sounded coarse. I can't understand why some people leave the room when commercials come on. How do they ever expect to lay claim to being an educated consumer? Why, they could end up wandering the aisles of the local supermarket for hours looking for toilet paper! "Oh, no, ma'am, haven't you heard? We don't carry THAT."
What's really impressive is the ubiquity of TV sets. They blare out in airport "lounges" (everybody's favorite oxymoron), where the news content has been censored to remove pointed references to airliners going down in flames; barbershops install one in case the pages of the March 1989 Bass Fisherman's Monthly are still stuck together; you'll even find them in auto repair shops where you can unwind with footage of gonzo trucks flattening vehicles like yours while the mechanics start drilling. A friend awaiting her cancer diagnosis in a local breast clinic reported being entertained, along with two dozen other grim-faced women and their spouses, by a televised shouting match, refereed by Oprah, between women with big breasts and women with small breasts. And they say modern medicine is unfeeling.
I hear that in Bill Gates' house, each wall is a giant screen capable of displaying 24-foot wide digitized images of your choice-great art or your favorite Beavis and Butthead outtakes, replayed over and over. Think of it.
Speaking of ubiquity, folks who complain about the demise of human interaction in gas stations will be happy to hear they're now simulating it by putting televisions in pumps. I encountered one on a recent trip to Boston.
The moment you put your credit card in the gas pump, a database in Omaha begins rifling through your permanent demographic file-the same one mortgage companies use to deny loans-and as the gas begins to flow, the screen doles out a suitable commercial. Actually, the system had a little trouble with me, but I'm sure it'll do better once the mainframes finish crunching all that FBI data to assemble a complete profile.
For now, the machine's slow, and you could almost hear the gas pump thinking: "Thirty-nine-year old white male Buddhist from Bible Belt; crotchety columnist; wears bow ties, plays oboe. Hmm, no appropriate commercials for him in our files. What the heck, run the tampon ad." And if you hang around too long pumping gas instead of rushing into the bullet-proof cage to snap up a box of tampons, the commercial runs a second time.
"America is a land of wonders," wrote Alexis de Toqueville in 1835, "in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement."
"Ah," responded his countryman Alphonse Karr a decade later. "Plus *a change, plus c'est la meme chose." The more they try to improve things, the more they keep screwing it up.
Paul Baerman, Fuqua '90, is a Durham resident.
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