Television Rehab

“You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”
– Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004

I really can’t say when it happened but the new aged nanny had lost her appeal. A majority of my youth was spent in front of her soft glow. Our relationship spans many wasted hours and I miss her as I miss a jaded lover. Yet, her monkey has left my back to attach its self to another. Over two months, I have been without her vision of the world and I wonder if I now see the world with disconnected eyes.

Without her, the world goes on and plays out on the headlines of newspapers, the pages of the Economist, and the links of google. But a new perspective takes hold. I read Matthew Ferrara’s “Repatriation Report” and identify with the view point of an American’s return home to a strange land.

He questions “if we really need 23 different varieties of toilet paper, 19 distinct toothpastes, 33 different deodorants”, and I say “we do need choices, provided those choices are from a speckled list of sources.” However, the point of freedom becomes lost when 3 companies sells 19 different flavors and all the profit goes to only 3 sources. The illusion of choice propagated at the source.

The new age nanny with her 500 technicolor dreams, designed to keep you entertained between commercial breaks. Her pitch boils down to soy biased hamburgers for a country starved for meat. Her focus was once the ideal; a Mary Tylor Moore or Dick Van Dyke world. Men who worked to provide for their family or Woman who strove for equality. They were both going to make it after all.

Fast forward to the exploits of Paris Hilton and reality television. The stark naked, alcohol infused, ugly light of society cast a dumb down versions of the heiress, to the delight of many including her accountant. The graven image is the rule of the modern day idiot box. The face is on the box reaps the benefits. The new age nanny is a beast to slave away your wasteful hours and sell you on cornucopia of cheap fixes. The rules never changed and you get what you paid for. They sell only dreams with foundations in lies.

Yet, stuck on an island without her subtle glow. I have to wonder, if a unified dream has more weight than gold. Is public perception a reality of it’s own and then what world do I find myself in? These are the questions I ponder without her in my life. But questions are better than a slothful life spent under her control.