Kill Your TV and Save Your Life

Reprinted. Desperate problems require desperate solutions.

Perhaps one day we might actually consider something so desperate as quitting Television, and by doing so, destroying the DNC's voter outreach arm (aka Television).

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I feel so hopeless about the political situation I've begun looking for Hail Mary solutions.

When a problem seems impossible so solve, Donald Rumsfeld said, expand it.

We all know what the expanded version of the problem is: The problem is that we live in, as Andrew Breitbart called it, a "Matrix" of leftist assumptions and propaganda, all being delivered to us 24/7 by a wireless intravenous drip system called television.

I've been thinking a lot about this. I've been thinking it's time to actually do something.

Just an idea, but I would like to start thinking seriously about delivering a truly grievous wound to the Political-Entertainment Complex.

I'm thinking about, firstly, stopping watching almost TV entirely and shedding cable stations. (Some cut the cable entirely.)

I say "almost entirely" because people are so addicted to TV at this point that I think it seems as hard to quit TV as it is to quit smoking. (By the way: It's easy to quit smoking.)

So let's throw in the "almost" caveat there and think about it like this: If I write down all the shows I watch, I think I'll be embarrassed and sad to see how many hours I sit as a voluntary, unmoving, passive spectator, watching other people perform Shows and other people perform in Sports and other people doing things.

Now, in this list, I happen to know that a lot of shows I don't particularly love. I either stopped enjoying them some time ago, or I never really enjoyed them.

Now there will probably be some shows I will want to watch. Okay, I'll make this deal with myself: I'll let myself watch 2-3 hours a tv a week if I get rid of all that very marginal shit I'm watching and use the time for something more constructive. Like reading, or spending actual human time with family and friends, or anything.

Literally doing anything is more worthy than sitting in front of the Idiot Box to be anaesthetized and hypnotized by stupefying beams of leftism. *

There is a reason this country is in terrible shape. It's because it's people have become slack in their thinking. Lazy. Stupid.

And right in front of me is a big 47" rectangular pill that makes people complacent, fat, unhealthy, dumb, disconnected from humanity, and disinterested in their own futures, nevermind their country's.

It seems to me the best solutions are the ones that solve multiple problems simultaneously.

One problem -- for me; maybe your own mileage varies -- is that TV makes it very easy to waste your life. It's a kind of death-before-death. We dream seven hours a night; do we have to also sit before a dreaming box and watch other people's dreams another three hours a day?

The other problem, of course, is that the Media is, as Andrew Breitbart always says, the Matrix, poisoning our minds with stupid, lazy, obese thinking, and they do so via the most effective means of transmitting stupidity, venality, and moral emptiness: The television.

And we will live in the Matrix until we destroy the Matrix.

So my idea is to start, as a movement, boycotting tv almost entirely, picking up, get this, new skills and hobbies and interests to fill the time we would otherwise be spending in front of the Radioactive Drug of the television screen.

Joining book clubs. Going on walks with our (get this) spouses and kids. Even doing "nerdy" stuff like bird watching, which, quite frankly, seems a whole lot more vital and vigorous than watching the shit they've thrown together to assassinate our brains tonight.

And we get used to watching ever less tv as we count down to next Fall, which is when we will really get serious about this, and watch virtually nothing, almost nothing at all, and not a single of the Terrific New Timewasting Shows they've made for us, for about three months.

And maybe this would be the moment to Cut All The Cables.

The pain we can inflict on Them (and yes, I'm comfortable calling them Them) is considerable.

But even more important than that, I think: We will not just be liberating the nation -- maybe -- but definitely liberating ourselves.

We all know what the problem is, but we're not actually doing anything about.

I think our nation has become very, very complacent and lazy. I cannot imagine people living a hundred years ago putting up with this bullshit so willingly.

We have become very Manageable.

I do not think Americans were made to be so Manageable.

And I think we're making ourselves Manageable by living the life of a Do-Nothing for so many of our free hours.

TV makes it easy to Do Nothing. It makes it easy to be bored. TV is not horrible-- don't get me wrong. It's occasionally funny or interesting. It could not draw so many of us to be voluntary prisoners to it every night if it were horrible.

But it is always a suboptimal choice. Whenever the TV is the main focus, that is a suboptimal choice made as to how to spend that hour.

Oh, I don't mean when the TV is on in background as one folds clothes. In that case, sure, one needs a distraction from the mindless work.

But most times, we could be spending those hours mindfully, and instead we're sitting glassy eyed and slack-jawed looking at glowing box of moving pictures.

Virtually any moment spent in front of the TV is a defeat.

When we were kids, not a one of us thought about the lives we would live when we were adults and thought, "Some nights, I swear, I'm gonna just come home from work and then watch five hours of TV straight!! Whoopee!!"

TV is compromise, TV is defeat, TV is acceptance, TV is mediocrity.

And it's an industry held almost entirely in Enemy Hands, by the idiot descendants of carnival-barkers and pornographers who just happened to realize that every new technology which permits people to live less life will be a financial winner.

We can free ourselves and maybe, even, free this country.

We can Kill The Messenger.

* Except Andy Levy.

The NDH Challenge. Niedermeyer's Dead Horse suggested starting small.

So I'm going to start small: Three days, through Tuesday, of no tv, with the one exception of French news, and that's not really watching TV. That's like homework, because I haven't kept up with it lately and my highly-perishable comprehension skills are slipping.

I mean come on -- you know watching the news in a language you barely understand is not the sort of passive thing I'm talking about.

But if you still say "that's cheating, Ace," fine, if you want, go ahead, assign yourself your own 2 hours of exception time tv.

Let's kill the fucking television this weekend, and let's see if our lives are any worse for having done so.

posted by Ace at 08:20 PM

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