TV Guy

 Until three years ago, I owned a behemoth thirty-plus inch Magnavox television, purchased in 1998. I hooked it up to a DVD machine and watched movies and TV-show collections. I never had cable--why pay for a thousand channels I was too busy (or inert) to watch?

   During those years I otherwise focused on what might loosely be dubbed spiritual growth. As a result, and because TV was not a large part of my daily life, I found myself increasingly at odds with a televisual world. I fulminated about TVs in restaurants and airports (thus becoming as boring as TV itself). When exposed to morning TV I’d feel assailed by the maddening chatter. Friends' channel-flipping would leave me rattled, and it seemed I lost the capacity to follow quick-cut TV sequences. 

   I also missed out on national zeitgeist-shaping events. I never once watched The Daily Show. Barak Obama’s presidency flashed past in a blur. Water cooler conversations about Breaking Bad or Keeping up with the Kardashians or Girls left me cold. Instead, I read magazines online and books at home. (There is nothing noble about reading books. Old habits die hard.) 
   Three years ago, while moving from San Francisco to a nearby small town, I rid myself of the old Magnavox. For the next couple of years I streamed movies and TV shows on my thirteen-inch MacBook Pro, feeling, at the advanced age of fifty-eight, oh so modern and whatnot.

  In the spring of this year, in order to keep up with the presidential election and to watch the San Francisco Giants win (which is to say, currently, lose), I purchased a 4K Android flat-screen TV. I had it hooked up to cable, the first time I’ve enjoyed such access since, oh, sometime in the nineteen-nineties.

   Funnily enough, after televisually experiencing most of this year’s baseball and election seasons I once again feel TV- and culturally literate. Televisions in airports and restaurants no longer bother me; advertisements no longer occasion silent scornful mental jeering. 

   That said, I still don’t avail myself of the million-and-a-half channels my cable package evidently offers. On the cusp of sixty, time seems short, and I’m just not willing to burn it watching cooking, auto-repair, weight-loss, wealthy-housewife, survival and other kinds of shows. I’ve still never seen “Duck Dynasty.” If I’m going to squander precious hours, I’d rather do it watching the Giants lose, which at the moment they’re doing with a perverse kind if genius, alas. 

   All of this arose for me after I came across a Huffington Post column this morning bearing the headline “Donald Trump is Gong to be Elected.” Written by Michael Rosenblum ("Founder of Current TV, Past President of NY Times TV”), its thesis is that Americans “voted” for Donald Trump “when The History Channel went from showing documentaries about the Second World War to ‘Pawn Stars’ and 'Swamp People'… when The Discovery Channel went from showing ‘Lost Treasures of the Yangtze Valley’ to ‘Naked and Afraid’… when The Learning Channel moved from something you could learn from to ‘My 600 Pound Life’… when CBS went from airing ‘Harvest of Shame’ to airing ‘Big Brother.’” 

   Mr. Rosenbaum further avers that our eight-and-a-half daily hours spent staring at screens--five of those at the television--soak us in video imagery, which means that America is by nature and intent a televisual culture. “The French may love food, the Italians may love opera,” he writes. “What we love is TV. … It defines us.” 

   He then goes on to make the case that “Donald Trump is great TV” and “Hillary Clinton is crap TV,” that “[h]e is Kim Kardashian. She is Judy Woodruff,” referring to the PBS News Hour anchor.

   I don’t wholly agree with Mr. Rosenbaum’s premise, but he does make a point. Once, being an American citizen meant being informed about the nature of government and its actors. Now it seems to mean being televisually conversant and perhaps otherwise entirely ignorant of governmental process and procedure. Television requires its own parsing, but it doesn't help viewers develop the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate a complex world--and democracy. 

   Donald Trump knows--and embodies--this new “citizenship,” for better and worse. He is not a wholly successful businessman, but he played one on TV. He has banked on his capacity for attracting media attention--which of course turned on him in the past month, to his great dismay--at the expense of creating a more traditional campaign TV-ad and ground game. 

   As for we voters, if it were solely a choice between Kim Kardashian and Judy Woodruff, we’d be out of luck. Happily, it’s not. Kim K. can exist in the same universe as JWood, and indeed does. This  means it’s up to each of us to sift through mediated chatter and imagery and, presently, to drill down to what’s actually true. Thence we vote. 

   Now--if only the bloody Giants would start winning.