TV or Not TV: That Is the Question
E. Michael Jones, PhD
I play the mandolin weekly at an Irish pub in South Bend, Indiana. Or at least I try to play the mandolin. The one thing I find that keeps me from playing, even more than my innate lack of musical talent, is TV.
No, I don't stay home and watch TV, because I don't have one. In 37 years of marriage, we had a TV just once, for the three years we lived in Germany, because it came with our rented, furnished apartment. No, it is the TV in the bar that keeps me from playing. From where I usually sit, a TV screen stares me in the face. There is no sound, so there is no content to occupy my mind. Just images, for the most part either baseball or football games. My eyes are drawn to the ever-changing images and eventually they glaze over and my playing slows down and then stops.
I suspect that we are physiologically incapable of ignoring something that's moving. If it's peripheral, our eyes want to make it the center of attention because, at some point way back, there was always a danger that that thing in our peripheral vision might end up eating us. It has happened in other situations as well-in fact, in both life and death situations. When my wife was giving birth to one of our five children, I found that I could not focus, not even on that momentous event, if a TV were playing the room. Hospital rooms, in case you haven't seen one in the last half century, are places where sick people watch television.
The same thing applies to the other end of human life. When Sam Shapiro was in the hospital dying I visited him on a regular basis. During one visit, I told him that when death was a distinct possibility we needed to focus on the four last things. "What are they?" he asked. "Death, judgment, heaven, and hell," I replied. The words were barely out of my mouth when Sam Said, "Look at that."
He then pointed to the TV, which showed a man actually dying by falling out of a hot air balloon. I was immediately sucked into the drama on the screen, and that ended our discussion of what turned out to be Sam's imminent death by looking vicariously at the image of the death of someone neither of us knew.
I mentioned all this because it provides the basis for my assertion that TV is a form of control. The fact that we as human beings find it almost impossible to ignore peripheral motion without making it the center of our attention explains television's control over our minds. This allows TV to become the most effective form of political control known to man.
I say "political control" because we have just gone through another election season, whose outcome - like virtually all campaigns - is determined largely by who spends more money on TV commercials.
Television is the ultimate narcissistic medium. The viewer is given the illusion that he has power while becoming more isolated and progressively more impotent. He can't ask candidates any questions. The only power he has is to change the channel and listen to another paid political advertisement.
Television controls the political process in a number of ways. Candidates who run out of money for TV ads do not often win. This means that any candidate who runs for office must raise exorbitant amounts of money, which he shovels like saw dust into the blast furnace known as the local TV station. Needless to say, some people make lots of money from this system. They, in turn, take that money and give it to the candidates who promise to do their bidding, who in turn give it back to the TV stations to get elected.
And who controls television? It's no secret that TV is controlled by anti-Christian forces. Television is not entertainment; it is a form of control. This is especially true of cable TV, which adds pornography to the mix of programming guaranteed to turn people into addicted and passive zombies.
There is, however, a very simple solution to this problem. Remove the television from your home. You will notice an immediate increase in your quality of life and the attention span of your children, even if you are the only one who does it. If enough people follow your example, the entire system of thought control will collapse and be replaced by the system of ordered liberty which the founding fathers intended from the beginning, where politicians were accountable to the people who voted for them rather than those who paid for their TV commercials.
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