on idiots

Lately (i.e. the past year) I’ve been thinking that Mr. G and I watch too much television. We rarely turn it on before 5PM, and when we do watch it we don’t watch for very long (far less than two hours, unless we’re watching a Netflix, but critically-acclaimed movies don’t count as “bad TV” right?).  While I’m all for indulging in pure entertainment — I, frankly, wouldn’t dare rob Bump of his precious Sesame Street hour — I do think that when it comes to me and mine the idiot box is just that: generally a waste of time that could be spent on:

a) more reading

b) familial interaction (we both work full-time)

c) physical movement (after two years, I still sometimes use the whole “well, I did just have a baby” excuse)

Before the Internets, the television wasn’t as problematic. But now, thanks to the convenience of things like laptops and wireless technologies, I find my precious intellectual/interaction/active time increasingly sucked into the vortex of television and cyberspace, or The Idiot Box and the Portable Idiot Box.

So a few weeks ago we canceled cable. We still get PBS (Sesame Street) and a few other channels, but we don’t have a very impressive menu of options anymore. At first Mr. G resisted — and I almost caved and called to upgrade — but after less than a week he reported not minding at all. So we’re actually watching less TV. And I’m working out more.  And we suddenly have more time to prepare real, non-nuked meals.
Here’s what Adrienne Rich had to say on the matter (excerpt courtesy of very good friend S):

The television screen has throughout the world replaced, or is fast replacing: oral poetry; old wives’ tales; children’s story-acting games and verbal lore; lullabies; “playing the sevens”; political argument; the reading of books too difficult for the reader, yet somehow read; tales of “when-I-was-your-age” told by parents and grandparents to children, linking them to their own past; singing in parts; memorization of poetry; the oral transmitting of skills and remedies; reading aloud; recitation; both community and solitude. People grow up who not only don’t know how to read, a late-acquired skill among the world’s majority; they don’t know how to talk, to tell stories, to sing, to listen and remember, to argue, to pierce an opponent’s argument, to use metaphor and imagery and inspired exaggeration in speech; people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen. (12-13)

–Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.