That’s right, folks.
I do occasionally flip the remote on the equally remote chance that I will run across something on TV that might be “interesting”. And boy howdy, did I find something late last night!!!
So there I was, post-midnight trying to stop my mind’s occupation with a compositional problem. Click click click click click click click. The usual tripe. Just missed a Porter Wagoner rerun from the ’70s on the Farm Channel…you don’t know about that show? Young country singers right out of the hills and coal mines? Young Dolly Parton, young George Jones and Waylon Jennings, etc? Singing with a great roots bluegrass band? Just out of the folk culture, before the inevitable American transformation from brilliance to Kenny G?
Priceless cultural history.
Das de music ob my PEOPLE, pendejo!!!
Anyway…click click click, and here’s this group of 20/30-something state college-type middle class Americans sitting in a hot tub pool. Doing NOTHING!!! Eyes blank, strange artificial lighting, surrounded by what appears to be Astroturf and a fake wooden fence.
Hmmmm…!!!
What is THIS!!!???
Read on for the awful truth.
What is it?
The scarily named Big Brother After Dark is what it is.
Now…I have never before successfully watched more than three minutes of ANY “reality” show except for a piece that I wrote during the Pie Fight over at little orange where I deconstructed the program that staged a FAKE “reality” show (They’re all fake, of course. This one just made no appreciable attempt to hide it.) on the theme of Gilligan’s Island. Which was ITSELF an early piece of empty hypnomedia shit. And as I said there…it was “The most disgusting thing I have ever held still for.”
However…this one tops it.
Why?
Because it is an unbelievably accurate look into the emptiness that is America today.
The America that “counts”, anyway. The prime demographic.
The VOTING demographic of the future.
Victims of the dread Paris Hilton disease, every one.
On parade for all to see and emulate.
Good looking girls…well, “good looking” in that antiseptic, Hooters-ish kind of way (Look but don’t touch.)…in bikinis, good looking men in bathing suits or at least mostly bare chested (Plus a couple of gay guys, including one real swisher for contrast. Strange…or not so strange…none of the females are apparently allowed to be gay. Just the men. Comic relief and all. Gay guys. The Stepinfetchits of our time.), sitting around a fake suburban manse-house (YOU know…those SUV/Hummer-looking houses that have sprung up by the millions safely outside of the war zones and high roller neighborhoods of corporate urban America?) doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Except blathering at one another.
Apparently this is a spin-off of a network half hour.
Three hours every night on SHO TOO.
A live feed. Of spiritually, emotionally, mentally and largely physically dead people.
Billed as “uncensored”. Which I thought might mean at least a little nudity and titillating sexual contact. But which really means being able to say “fuck” a lot.
I was fascinated.
Now…I understand the human tendency called voyeurism. If you can’t DO it, sometimes watching it is almost as interesting, and usually a whole lot safer as well.
(Voyeurism. It’s sometimes called “network news”, y’know. Or “movies”. Or…”That’s ENTERTAINMENT!!!” Yup.)
But…WATCHING PEOPLE DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!???
Hmmmm….
And then it struck me.
That’s what they WANT us to do.
Eat, shit, and talk.
And…vote.
They do not even need us to work much anymore. Just consume. In the 1/2 hour that I watched, NO ONE ever mentioned “work”. Whatever it is that they do outside of this little planet upon which they are being filmed 24/7. There is a door to the outside world…I saw people open and close it. It’s right next to the refrigerator. But the outside world does not exist. At least it does not exist for the purposes of this show. Just the house and its demographically correct slice of future Omertica.
Empty semi-grownup boys and girls.
Empty eyes.
Empty.
The MTV generation.
EMPTV.
And y’know…it’s working.
I spent a dreary day recently in a suburban house much like this one with two families (Mommy/Daddy/several kids)..don’t ask what brought me there, it’s not worth it.) and some of their friends from the largely nonexistent “neighborhood”. And I wondered the whole time…”WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE ABOUT?” Because…there was no one home in this home. No one.
The giant TV was on.
Baseball…
There were several iPods…each with its own little nasty sounding speakers…playing bullshit music in several rooms.
People were eating literal CRAP.
And no one SAID anything.
Not really.
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it” wrote Samuel Clemens a century or so ago.
Well here…everybody talked about nothing and nobody did anything about ANYTHING.
NOW I understand.
This is what is in store for us all. If we are not careful.
They didn’t name it “Big Brother” for nothing.
Orwell wrote the book. But he was wrong.
It’s not going to be “newspeak”.
It’s going to be NEWS speak.
“20 people were blown up today in Iraq. Buy McDonald’s. What’s for dinner. The President violated the constitution once again. Nice titties. And now the news.”
24/7.
Everything is equal.
Everyone is equal, too.
Equally uninteresting.
Equally unimportant.
Equally empty.
And now the news.
GOTCHA!!!
And y’all wonder why I espouse the ideas of MEDIASTRIKE!!! and NEWSTRIKE!!!
There it is.
Your future.
Tune in and see for yourself.
Big Brother After Dark.
Yup.
(Fade to snow….)
AG
