On the night Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, I had the misfortune of being near a TV set connected to a cable news network (doesn't matter which one; they're all the same, all equally right-wing, all mind-numbingly dumb). I work part-time on the copy desk of a daily newspaper and the sets are turned on, with the sound off, just in case any breaking news might have a local connection. Sometimes, during big news events — such as this hurricane — the volume is switched on and the blithering idiocy of "live action" TV correspondents washes down upon us as we try to concentrate on correcting the spelling, grammar, syntax and logic of local reporters freshly minted from our nation's journalism schools.
On this night, an epiphany hit me the way the rising waters have hit and destroyed so many people's lives in Louisiana and Mississippi: TV is evil. It is pernicious, vile, creepy, stupid, annoying, abusive, divisive, dangerous, devious, and dumb, dumb, oh so proudly dumb. I have glimpsed into the eyes of strait-jacketed psychotics and not been filled with the dread that watching television now instills in me. Watching TV is not even ironically funny any more, the way pro wrestling used to be, with the hairy-backed ape-like heavies in sinister masks squaring off against the All American Boy in the red, white and blue trunks. It's monstrous, the informational equivalent of tossing steaming entrails on the rocks and poking around among the goo.
Watching television for any longer than the 14 seconds it takes you to lunge at the set and flail frantically at the control panel in hopes of engaging the "Off" button is like staring at the raw pathology of a terribly disturbed patient. We have all known for years that the medium sucked. We all knew it was a waste of time, a petri dish for the lowest common denominator. Harlan Ellison in The Glass Teat, Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death and Bill McKibben in The Age of Missing Information have, of course, eloquently documented this. But never has the virus been so widespread, so oozing with pus and scuzzy amoeboid freaks as it is now.
For example, on the night of the hurricane, rather than focus on the unfolding human tragedy — and this will be as devastating, in sheer human toll, as any natural disaster in American history — the freaks on cable news were concentrating on "looters" (read: black people getting supplies to feed families because our president, the most unpopular in modern times, is on permanent vacation, has sent the National Guard needed to monitor and manage this catastrophe off to die in an illegal war in Iraq, and he is "getting on with my life"). These correspondents were posed so that their perfect hair was mussed by the wind, to demonstrate how they were putting their lives in danger, and they were talking about, oh … uh … how this "wasn't a direct hit" and "it wasn't as bad as it could have been." Are you shitting me? This was hell on earth, as devastating as that tsunami all the Republican politicians wanted to use as a backdrop for compassionate conservative photo opps.
If that weren't scuzzy enough, a human pustule called Nancy Grace interrupted the hurricane coverage in order that we could ponder "Day 92 of the Missing Girl in Aruba." Day Fucking 92!!?? Oh, holy Christ. Oh, Jesus, I hope you do, as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and James Dobson so yearn, make a Second Coming. I want you to see this. I want you to see what and who you died for. You died for the right of Nancy Grace to spew green toxic gibberish from twixt her rancid teeth and get paid millions to lower America's collective IQ. Each day, each minute, it seems to be diving lower, thanks largely to TV. Did you really die, Jesus, so that your messenger, Rev. Robertson, could advocate killing elected leaders of other nations, or that this same man could make millions from African diamond mines, profits derived from modern-day slavery and torture? Did you die so that the man who claims you "changed my heart" could, willy nilly, start a war that has to date killed 2,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? Did you really die so that copter cams could scan the detritus of natural disasters for any sign of "looters" or any other hideous footage, hopefully with a wailing child snagged by a tree branch or a bloated grey-green corpse impaled by a lamppost?
Late breaking news: The president has "cut short" his vacation. What a man! Only 4.5 weeks of rest during wartime and national calamity instead of 5.
