Only Fred and Barney could fail at fast-food!
Television is the depression box, as I noted before. It teaches learned helplessness and encourages viewers to be a passive audience in life, rather than an active participant. And I know this, as I watched an awful lot of television in my youth. Of course, today we stream video on our phones and gas pumps and that's entirely different - right?
I suppose we were the first generation really raised on television. Sure, television had been around even before the war. But it wasn't until the 1950's that it really took off and sets became affordable for the first time, thanks to "consumer financing." By the time I was born in 1960, the television was present in the majority of American households and was on for hours a day.
It started slowly, of course. Back then, television stations went off the air after midnight and didn't start broadcasting again until the early morning. Late-night and morning shows were not widely watched - people needed their sleep and to get to work. Daytime television was a wasteland of cheap "soap operas" that were frowned upon as low-class entertainment, suitable only for lazy housewives or to watch while you were doing your ironing. It was "prime time" or nothing. And there was a lot of nothing.
Saturday morning was kids time - cartoons and other kid's fare which we watched in our pajamas while consuming a ton of sugary breakfast cereals as well as an inordinate amount of advertising. If only we had the latest and greatest toy, our lives would be complete! We were saturated with media in a manner unknown to previous generations.
Oddly enough - or not so oddly - the message the television sent was watch more television - which literally became a "thing" by the mid-1970s when half the ads on television were for other television shows - and sometimes even for the one you were watching! The message was subtle but clear: don't bother trying, don't try to improve your life, don't try to be self-actualizing. Just watch television, live vicariously through the lives of others, like Walter Mitty!
But just to drive the message home, you start to notice that in each of the television shows, whenever a character tries to better themselves, they end up failing spectacularly. The clip above is from The Flintstones, which was a cartoon version of The Honeymooners. In both shows, the blue-collar protagonists get caught up in get-rich-quick schemes that end up in abject failure. The "carhop song" is a earworm that has persisted since the 1960's. Only Fred and Barney could screw up a fast-food franchise. It didn't help matters any that their spouses were against it from the get-go. The message is startlingly clear: Don't bother trying. Get a "good job" somewhere and show up on time (lest Mr. Spacely fire you!). Keep your head down and keep working. Stop trying to better yourself!
Realistically, this might be good advice for the majority of the population, too. Few of us are cut out to to run a business, which requires you make a lot of hard choices and be strict with your employees. It also requires a lot of risk-taking and yes, the failure rate is high.
But in almost every television sitcom, the protagonists fail at everything - not just wacky get-rich-quick schemes. The gang on Gilligan's Island never got off the island, despite their efforts every episode. Sure, they eventually get rescued in the end, only to return once again. And it isn't just dumb characters or blue-collar workers. Mr. Douglas was a lawyer in Green Acres, yet was unable to run a farm or even fix up his farm house. Fortunately, the less educated residents of Hooterville helped steer him toward the light: Give up and stop trying and be like the rest of us. Even Arnold the pig knew the right answer - watch more television!
And a pig shall lead them...
Not much has changed over the years. Television shows still teach passivity and sloth. If you are to get ahead in life, it is only through lottery-winning type means - winning at a game show or a warbling vocal competition. If success is shown at all on television, it is by living vicariously through the lives of "celebrities" who are often celebrated simply for being celebrities. And often, they are depicted as banal, evil, conniving, drug-addicted horrible people - which satisfies our need to feel superior to them, even as we admire their gold-plated bathroom fixtures.
I mentioned it before that people who are on television don't watch television. I recall an interview decades ago, where the interviewer asked Katie Couric what her favorite television show was. She explained that she had to get up at four in the morning, take a limo to the studio, spend an hour in makeup, an hour going over the plans for the show and so on and so forth. It was exhausting work that left little time for watching television (certainly not the 4.6 hours a day the average American watches!), She nearly gave up the game right there, and almost immediately backtracked and listed four or five of the most popular shows of the era.
Today, television is still with us, augmented by even more forms of screen time, in particular, the smart phone. It is embarrassing how much time we spend on these devices. They are like cigarettes - we pick up the phone first thing in the morning and look at it all throughout the day until we finally set it down before bed at night - and if we wake up in the middle of the night, we check it again - hoping for a drop of dopamine and another cute kitty video.
Video games are the same way. Forget the claims they lead to violent behavior (because, yea, shooting people for hours a day could never desensitize you to violence, right?) the far worse effect is the scandalous number of hours - dozens or even hundreds of hours spent trying to "get to the next level" or worse yet, the money spent paying your way through.
Of course, people are free to do as they please. But many folks complain that their lives are empty or that they are not getting anywhere - but at the same time, watching countless hours of television, glued to the smart phone, or wetting their pants because they can't get away from a first-person-shooter game that can't be paused.
I look back at my life and wonder how I was able to work full-time at a job and then go to law school at night - and come home and remodel the kitchen until midnight. I would go to bed, get up, and do it all again the next day. And yet we still had time to do fun things on vacations and during the weekends.
Prior to that, I worked 2-3 jobs and went to night school at SU. During the day, I would work at Carrier and then deliver pizzas at night - on the nights I wasn't in class and on the weekends. Where did I get all that energy? Where did I get all that time?
Well, I had the energy because I was young. And I had the time because I didn't have a television. I had also given up drugs and drinking, too. But eventually, a decade later, we bought a "big screen" tube television and got back on the bandwagon. I can't say it was an improvement in my life.
I don't have the energy at age 64 to work 2-3 jobs or, in fact, even one. There will always be time to catch up on your tee-vee watching in the retirement home - trust me on that. What is sad to me is to see young people, in the prime of their lives, spending countless hours in front of the "boob tube" while complaining their life sucks and getting more and more depressed.
It almost seems like a system designed to keep people depressed and poor, doesn't it? But we don't truck in conspiracy theories here.
