Seeking Progressive Social Change

So there I am, standing in line at the post office, watching the ubiquitous television silently running through the standard montage of daily disasters. Homes falling into rivers, people being mugged on security cameras, twenty car pileups on the highway, and on.

Just another day among my fellow citizens in the public square. And I ask you: Is this information we need to help us build fulfilled lives? Does it better our democracy?

No. It’s cheap entertainment. And since it comes by way of other people’s misery, (hurricanes, floods, unsolvable dilemmas), it’s entertainment at another’s expense, and for cable news profits.

That, dear readers, is called exploitation.

About a year back I had to go to the local cable TV store, the place where you exchange a busted remote or set-top box. And there they were: Three TVs tuned to Lifetime, keeping the folk well sedated during the wait, I suppose. They were running some sappy “romance” movie, and a woman was being raped and beaten while we stood there watching.

It was the most surreal event you can imagine - not just because a woman was being sexually abused before our eyes, but that most people yawned and scratched themselves as if nothing was wrong with it.

Why is it OK that people are raped, pillaged and beaten across 500 channels all day long and it’s OK with us? What’s happened to our sense of perspective? And why must we - and our kids - be subjected to this junk at public spaces? More and more you run into television intruding onto our public world. My bank’s got them, the doctor’s office uses them, even the diner I used to like put them up. We don’t eat meals in my house with the television on; why would I go to a restaurant to sit dumbly in front of one there?

This is one of those political arguments that transcends party. Right-wing, left-wing, we ought to all feel outrage over the excesses of commercial entertainment and its intrusion into our private lives. (And if you want some warm and fuzzies check out Mr. Obama’s eloquence on media and kids here.) That’s why I also love organizations like White Dot, in the UK, a country which frankly is miles ahead of the US in terms of recognizing the negative impact of media on our lives. You can even choose a “media-free” car on the London-Heathrow train. Imagine that.

I think the awareness in the US is starting to jell. Although - sadly - the website for TVTurnoff appears to have gone dark, the Center for Screen Time Awareness seems to have picked up the slack. (If anyone has information on either of these sites, please let me know.) Many people I know profess embarrassment at watching TV, a welcomed sign-of-the-times. Still, the next time you enter a public space and there’s a TV blaring away, just zap the thing with your TV-B-Gone. And help bring a little more peace into the world.

I’ve been a Mets fan - a fanatic, really - for over thirty years. Since 1976, when I was 10 years old, the first thing I’ll do in the morning is grab the newspaper, turn to the Sports section, and soak up Mets news. I’m talking about a thirty-year-old habit, which I’ve extended to the online realm, like checking www.metsblog.com ten times a day. I do this in January as much as June. I’m that nuts.

If you want to know why I can tell you about my grandfather, his coming from Russia to New York, his love for the NY Giants and the hours we spent together watching the Mets. Or my own psychology behind my letting a baseball team’s loss ruin my good mood when there’s plenty of other disasters in the world that ought to do a better job. But the bottom line is that I’ve been a Mets fan all my life and that’s that.

If you follow the sport or if you live near a big-media zone like New York, you know the madness that can surround a team when the media smells trouble. In the 70s the Yankees had the Bronx Zoo, a daily soap opera among Reggie, Billy, and The Boss. Embarrassing, really. But I didn’t care - I kind of reveled in watching the hated - and perpetually winning - Yankees roil through turmoil, especially because my team was so terrible at the time.

But that was the tame 70s. Who knew how insane the media circus would become, with blogs, social media, and the wild appetite for celebrity news? I’m 41 years old now. I have zero interest in celebrities lives or celebrity gossip. It’s just more bread and circuses.

Yet now this same media concentration is swallowing up sports. The news around the Mets recently (recent winning streak aside) has read more like something out of Us Magazine than Sports Illustrated. Headlines had been railing about the “firestorm” over what the manager said, what the closer said, what the first baseman didn’t say. ESPN spent multiple innings covering this junk during a Sunday night game, with tight closeups of players’ faces as they “struggle” to overcome the “stress” of playing through the turmoil.

Gimme a break. What is this, high school? I’m a fan of the game on the field, the thinking-person’s part of the game. Strategizing along with the manager. The anticipation; not what’s happening but what’s ABOUT to happen. This is what makes baseball so excruciatingly wonderful.

“He said, she said” is not a game that interests me. At all.

Truth is my 30-year love affair with the Mets - with baseball - has been in jeopardy for while, mostly due to the endless stream of advertising that they slip into every possible nook and cranny of a broadcast. The DVR lets you skip the ever-lengthening commercials between innings but there’s little escape from the in-game interruptions, the “pitching change brought to you by…” or “the game-time temperature,” or “this broken bat” or “spit through the teeth” and on and on. But now the celebritizing of the game makes me pretty much skip the Sports page, the pre-game show and the all-sports radio station here in NY, WFAN. I still watch the game itself but the love affair is being killed off by the endless product pitch and non-sports related carping out of the maddening media. Who needs it?

Anyone who reads this blog knows about my passion for shutting out commercial infotainment, which uses emotional manipulation to push a seductive agenda of satisfaction through purchase. Meantime, we grow more ignorant about government shenanigans because fewer of us are paying attention, or getting real news. But I always excluded sports media from this mix, which in some ways has represented a very honest model of media taking those in charge to task. Imagine if the President had to face a room full of reporters asking key strategic questions about that day’s administrative decisions without any concern for being “fair” or “balanced”? Or if we as citizens spent our time on the radio like sports talk listeners do, arguing about real issues that really mattered, instead of “value” issues about pastors or flag pins or gay marriage diversions that represent the appearance of debate.

Sports coverage and sports radio has always seemed to be the most democratic discussions on the commercial dial, because it transcends political ideology for the bottom line: winning. So while I rail about “smashing the TV” on this blog the truth is I’ve kept mine running because I watch baseball, my last excuse for keeping the thing.

I’m starting to rethink that now. And so that noise you next hear might be my foot aimed squarely at the center of my Sony.

If you’re a regular reader of ChangeAny1Thing you’ll have noticed a distinct lack of activity around here. The cause: I’ve left my job of seven years for greener pastures. And by “green” I don’t mean - alas - that I’ll be working on sustainability projects in DC. Instead I may be able to pay a few more bills without having a heart attack when I open my checkbook. But it leaves much less time for kicking around blogs and posting to my heart’s content all day.

This site is not going away; there’s still - more than ever - a need for transformative social progress; even though Obama appears to have defeated the forces of evil we are a long, long way from the progressive changes we really need.

So watch this space. It’s going to be a long summer of presidential politics, and it’ll get ugly. Meantime, there’s talk of gas hitting $7.5o a gallon. A frightening thought that would reach deep into the economy, all the way to the upper middle class which has been able to weather all of the economic changes of the last 25 years, and which has functioned as a reactionary bulwark against real change.

There’s good and bad in the oil prices, I guess. The bad is the devastating impact on so many American families, including mine. The good is the anger level that would rise with prices (and more responsible use of energy), raising a collective willingness for serious, elemental change. And maybe - just maybe - the generation that gave us the last great social movement of the 60s would wake up from their generational sleep and help bring the next one.

Hat tip to the always enlightening Moue Magazine (my daily reading; visit often) for their link to ChangeAny1thing in an excellent post about growing up in a house where parents (to their credit) limited the family’s exposure to commercial media. From the article:

I bet. Look, I grew up on 1970’s television. I can probably re-enact every Gilligan’s Island plot and can quote the Brady Bunch at will (I guess; no one’s asked me in a while).

I watched hours and hours and hours of television.

And here I am, 41 years old and a rather well-adjusted member of society (most of the time, anyway). So what’s my deal with the endless rants about smashing the TV?

Here’s the thing: There was a difference between commercial entertainment then and the media monstrosity we’ve got now. A big difference. Spending hours at the mercy of mellow 70’s passive entertainment - on maybe five different channels, tops - is admittedly troubling, and may be the reason I never became a lawyer, let’s say. Ultimately not the best way to spend a childhood (God knows).

But: Spending hours and hours (and hours) with hyper-realistic, psychologically manipulative, adult-oriented, sexualized, super-violent, and emotionally intrusive material - across 500 channels or whatever - is a whole different thing. And that’s what we’ve got today. In the 70’s watching too much television was a troubling social concern. Today it really does threaten our democracy.

Of course, we can’t look back at newsreels from the 50s without cracking up at the horn-rimmed, slicked- hair, t-shirt squares bemoaning the dangers of rock ‘n roll. Turns out Elvis wasn’t the end of civilization as we knew it, after all.

But it’s a whole new ballgame today. Just consider the sneering, nasty tone of commercial entertainment, which alone is enough to make us want to toss the thing in the closet and run to the nearest library. That’s even before we consider the disinformation that passes for “news” (70% of Americans blamed Iraq for 9/11 - enough said) or the consumerist blatherings that spin us into thinking that a fulfilled life is defined by a pursuit for self-gratification. And I’m just getting started.

Popular culture can be – and has been – truly great, and even great art, especially when it represents an organic response to modern living. But when it exists as part of a pre-conceived marketing plan, it’s manipulative crapola. More and more of today’s commercial entertainment – which after all comes by way of a shrinking handful of media conglomerates - carries a “hidden agenda”. It’s getting harder and harder to know what’s really being sold with the entertainment we’re getting, with viral videos of “amateurs” that turn out to be music label plants on YouTube, or “news” shows that do in-depth “features” of films produced by another department of the television network. Or military “experts” who appear objective but are planted, pro-war messengers instead.

Democracy remains the best form of social arrangement we’ve got. But just as businesses need well-defined property laws or a well-run postal system in order to operate best, democracies require a well-informed public that can make thoughtful, wise decisions. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? We could end up with a president we want to share a beer with instead of a well-qualified leader. Shudder. Just imagine what might happen in a world like that.