Kill Your TV!!
I just got word my TV, a 32 inch Vizio, is spying on us. Evidently it’s capable of sending data back to its central headquarters where our avid interest in all things PBS are collected, collated and analyzed. For all I know these statistics are being sold to the Trump administration and filed under NEVER WATCHED ONE EPISODE OF THE APPRENTICE. ALERT THE FCC IMMEDIATELY!
I blame myself. I brought the cyclops into our house well aware that it was not my friend. It was a time-stealer, an electronic sedative, a babysitter and worse, a mediocre mess of programming. But I never imagined it as a spy. Oh, maybe I had some subliminal fears. Might explain the time when I lived in Seattle and Gomorrah that I tied a dummy to a chair and set the chair in front of a TV set in the living room. The TV had a Thunderbird wine bottle smashed through its picture tube. Guests who came over fell into two categories: those who treated it like an art installation and those who averted their eyes and ignored what to them was a disturbingly unacceptable tableau of deviant behavior.
Deviant behavior was probably the correct answer. Once, in the same year, my roommates and I dragged a TV into the vacant lot next door and proceeded to stone it to death. We hooked it up to an extension cord for maximum spark and implosion. When I moved up here to the island, we continued the tradition, but by then we aimed for peak destruction and tossed the one-eyed beast into a bonfire before smashing its eye. It became a kind of tradition, this television destruction. But like a lot of traditions, it lapsed over time.
Back in about 1982 my parents visited and were seriously alarmed that the only working TV in the shack was an old black and white with something wrong with the volume. At top volume it only whispered. Watching it was like a return to silent movies. Without the piano man. So naturally they decided to give us an early Christmas present in September. Our first color TV. So they could watch it when they visited when we’d exhausted conversations.
And now, 35 years later, we still have a TV. A TV we watch. And a TV that watches us. I suppose we could watch reruns of the Apprentice to give the appearance of compliance to the Donald’s ego. But we don’t have cable and I doubt we could find those reruns. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to return to those old traditions and just burn the bastard.
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