TELECIDE
V1.00
Earl Perry
This originally appeared in the Journal of the North American Waldorf Parents Newsletter, 1991.

    When I went down to Glenn's, I used the ostentatiously sad, cold, and dutiful voice men use to inspirit one another to do really unpleasant jobs, telling him, "Glenn, you getter get your .357."  Glenn was the game warden, so when he saw the .45 in my hand, he doubtless figured we were headed up the mountain to destroy a calf elk that had disemboweled itself on the prongs of the first and last barbwire fence it would ever try to leap.  The kind of melancholy errand little boys don't dream of when they dream of becoming game wardens or park rangers.

    I had a cheerier euthanasia in mind -- electronic.  At the little range we used for qualification, I set up the family TV; together, we put 13 shots through it.  It resembled the woman flayed in the essay by Swift; you would hardly believe how it improved the set's appearance for the worse.  The tube, of course, imploded heartily; the console soon had an Admiral Nelson appearance; and the channel selector, whose round shape (now obsolete, I understand) drew heavy fire, soon had the looped and windowed raggedness of Lear's garments.

    All in all, I don't think the standard American family will ever find a better use for 13 cartridges.  Now it is 7 years since the fragments joined spent brass and old targets in an ashcan, and when the children are at my house, the poor devils have to read or be read to; do homework; do chores; do their part at training the dog; work on projects; converse like human beings.  I don't even let them describe, in their endlessly consecutive narrative style, the latest episode of the Ninja Turtles, the Simpsons, or 'plays' from sports events they don't even participate in.

    But they do get to whine.  They get to whine about not having a TV.  And I get to answer that whining, a considerable pleasure.  "Of course," I tell them, "OF COURSE you can have a TV.  What do you take me for, an insensitive ogre who wants to nip the tender shoots of your psychosexual and social development?  Do you think I don't know how terribly critical it is to be able to spend 10 minutes describing how "Clete" Moron passed to "Buck" Neanderthal for 5 and made the 1st down?  Do you think I WANT you to miss episodes of As The Stomach Turns?  SURE you can have a TV.  I won't spend MY money on the damned thing, but you can spend yours on Anything You Want."

    "Of course, we'll have to rig up a bicycle generator to power it.  Then you can watch Anything You Want, as long as you keep pedaling.  It's the ecological thing, you know; we don't want to raise up a batch of heedless flabby little anti-environmentalists here."

    I first began to contemplate telecide when I was a river boatman in college.  I used to examine the effects of TV when I dealt with my dudes.  They were successful American professionals, more adventurous than normal, entrusted to me for river trips in Grand Canyon, on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, in Hells Canyon, here and there in the great western canyons.  I concluded that TV had some unfortunate, though logical, effects on them.

1. They couldn't talk -- they carried on their conversations, their arguments, their expostulations, their debates, and their seductions, with sitcom one-liners.  He or she who could produce these witlets most profusely was looked to with gratitude as the life of the party, for with such a one present, you need never endure silence.
2. They couldn't listen -- a slight exaggeration.  They could listen the way baby birds ingest.  You could drop factoids in their beaks, but never paragraphs or stories; even as they couldn't speak a paragraph, so they couldn't follow one spoken.  As to restating what you had said, or advancing an argument to confute yours that showed they had understood your points, they couldn't.  Even the factoids went unexamined, and were soon dispersed to vapor.  Later I learned that standard Americans watching a half-hour news broadcast with 20 items are able to recall 1 item from it an hour later.  The public's right to know has become the public's right to contentless stimulation.
3. They were defensive -- if you asked them about TV, they invariably said, "I know it, I know it, but there's some really good stuff on TV, like Jacques Cousteau specials."  Or, "There's some really educational stuff on TV."  If you asked them (and these were high-IQ professionals) to state a fact that they had learned from TV, not one could do it.  Not one, and not one fact.  I asked this question of many, many dudes, over many years.  Of course, they had every right to be defensive.  They were saying something false, and they knew it.  TV is not educational, and they weren't using it for that anyway.
4. They lived, intellectually, like a great undersea forest of kelp, immersed in the nutrient medium.  Their opinions were garnered by watching lifted eyebrows on the faces of blown-dry newscasters.  Awash in bath-warm innuendo, adrift in eddies of moist concern, silted in by turbid flurries of sentiment, the dudes found their opinions adsorbed to them, as a gas molecule adsorbs on the surface of a carbon particle: unthought, unexamined, depthless.
   

    It used to infuriate them to meet Buckskin Bill, a hermit whose real name was Sylvan Hart.  Hart, who was the subject of a book called The Last of the Mountain Men, had entered the wilderness (the Salmon River Primitive Area) in the 1930s.  He read Latin and Greek (largely self-taught, but the skiff he built really was called Xapon), was a chemical engineer by training, oversaw a group that created a bomb-sight in World War II, crafted his own flintlocks and rifled them with a hand-carved double-helix button system, build his own house, and subsisted on what he shot, trapped, caught, and grew.  He lived, though, on what he thought and studied.

    Hart was a knower of things, thoughtful and crusty.  For instance, if you commented to Hart that his (elk hide) hat resembled the headcoverings worn by the conquistadores, you got an unobtrusively and fabulously learned disquisition on pan-European hat and head armor styles from the crusades through the early Renaissance, with his ideas on how physiology and wound effects from edged weapons had influenced the designs.

    When my dudes met him and weren't able to listen to him, they had only a visual standard to apply.  Of course they decided his stumpy, hairy, smelly figure, encased in bearskin pants, was not too impressive by Madison Avenue standards, so they'd attempt to patronize him.  This was never very successful.  In fact it really was not successful At All.  You couldn't quell him with sitcom one-liners, and he didn't care how many of you and your friends thought alike.  "You know," he'd say, "You're a city person, got some opinions from the TV on a few topics, all of 'em valueless.  They're valueless because you've never stopped to think through any of your ideas.  Now you can ask me about practically anything, and get an opinion with some weight behind it; I've spent 50 years thinking and reasoning about 'em."  If a dude tried to argue, Hart would prove his truth; not one of them could ever stand against his reasoning.

    I was awe-struck, of course, and what better hero for a college kid than a polyglot, polymath hermit who made his own tools from scratch.  I was not Hart, but like most of the boatmen I had been absolved by my occupation of television, and had (like most of the boatmen) discovered I could talk. So I tried it on my dudes.  The dudes all knew, for example, that guns were terrible things and needed control; that women were good things, and needed liberation; that rape was a terrible thing except when a "minority person" committed it, when it was to be "understood;" that human life was so infinitely precious that it ought never to be taken no matter the provocation or policy, except when it was in the womb, where it was terminable at will.

    If you asked about these things, or flatly contradicted these wisps of received wisdom, you drew withering statements like, "You seem like an intelligent person, and I can't believe any intelligent person would be against (or in favor of) __________."  Supply any anhistoric darling idea of the moment for the ___________.  In short, the dudes had no arguments or answers at all.  They hadn't thought about it, they hadn't reasoned it out; they just found these ideas adhering to them and offered them as proudly as if they had some content.

    The question was then, and is now, what is TV good for?  My thought is that TV serves a couple of functions in generic American families.  If you have one, you don't have to talk.   You can use it as a baby-sitter and escape forming relations with your children; you can use it as a spouse-avoidance tool; you can avoid facing your own potential: all with the magic box.  Pain and elation are vacuumed into the tube, and their place silently encroached by the pabulum it supplies.  A void filled with drivel doesn't feel empty -- though it is.  Watching television is one of many choices you can make in the United States, not directly to die, but not to live.

    The other thing it gives you is brainless time.  But nothing else.  I suspect the need for brainless time is a constant in history and a constant in each personality; think of those countless human beings through time and their countless hours watching fires and darning socks, mending harness, straightening arrows, imagining hypnagogically, embroidering samplers, beading moccasins, scraping bows, engraving shapes, retelling myths.  At the end of those spacious evenings, they had usable socks and harness, samplers to dazzle suitors, limb-balanced bows, ornate moccasins, an imagination exercised, small arts, an exact body of lore mastered.  What do you have after 10,000 evenings of TV?  More to the point, what do your children have?

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