The Warmth of the Electric Fire

As hard as it has always been for my children to grasp (Patrick is 25 and Michelle is 20), there was a time in the world when television was not in color. I explained this to my son (too) many years ago when we were negotiating (I caught on to this a little too late) to get him a bigger TV than the one that sat on the shelf in his bedroom (his sister hadn't yet arrived-the FedEx driver got lost).
He had inherited our 'extra' TV, the one we had started our married lives with but didn't use anymore (the next one was, unsurprisingly, bigger, shinier, snazzier with more buttons and dials-and ultimately the same contents) and he was having difficulty grasping why he couldn't have a set as large as the one in the living room.
In the course of the conversation, my variation of 'trudging through six miles of snow, uphill, both ways' bubbled up as I noted when I was his age, I didn't have my own TV and the only one we had in "my house" (in New Jersey) was black and white. For a four-year old in Offenbach am Main, Germany, geographic details that Carmen San Diego might love (where is she, come to think about it) such as 'in New Jersey' are beyond difference without distinction. Patrick cut to the chase with a single-mindedness of purpose I can only assume he inherited from his mother. Seizing on my words, he sat up in bed and demanded to know, 'all you had was black and white?' I assured him this was, indeed, the case--and mulling that over for a moment he offered quietly, 'you must have been very bad if you had no color.' Despite repeated explanations he refused to believe, I wasn't bad (well, hardly) and NOBODY had a color television.

What were once vices are now habits, of course, which is how both crack cocaine and High Definition TV have spread across the universe (do NOT tell Yoko Ono I just typed that phrase, okay? She'll have Elliot Mintz on me in null comma nichts seconds and I just don't need that today). Instead of being a diversion or addition or an enhancement to our lives, we have, in the course of half a century, made the television the centerpiece of our living arrangements. No? Look at where you live, and more directly, how you live. That cabinet your mother gave you from the 'old house' where you grew up (before she sold it because it was too big to manage, especially after Dad died and she moved to Florida), a quasi-family relic, is randomly placed in a corner, maybe in front of a radiator or partially blocking a window. The television, on the other hand, in the living room, my brother (and/or sister) is the center of focus for the room. The couches and other chairs are placed X and Y steps from it, with the lamps and coffee tables just so and DON'T touch any of the furniture (and keep your shoes off the couch). If it makes you feel better, and it may not, based on first-hand experiences from across half the globe, we all make the television our window to the world, the electric fire in the hearth of our homes.

We don't worry nearly enough about what's actually on the television as we do about where it is in the room. Springsteen once lamented he had 57 Channels (and Nothin' On) which means, I assume, he bought a basic cable package probably without HBO and Starz. Gotta admit I'm a bit disappointed-if anybody could've afforded the premium package, maybe to include Internet and phone, it'd been Bruce.
Our parents used to watch TV, those 'entertainment centers' with the tiny picture screens and the cloth-covered single speaker (about 3 inches in diameter under the picture tube) encased in humongous pieces of wood furniture, after a day in the real world for amusement and diversion. Now, we watch programs called the "Real World" on TV and there's nothing very amusing about them at all.
Maybe the biggest shift from our folks to us to and through our children is how we get our information of the world beyond our door. Our parents read newspapers (their parents had watched newsreels in movie theaters as part of their Saturday Night Out ritual) and listened to the broadcast generation who'd followed Edward R. Murrow ("...This is London calling", sorry Joe, he got there first) for radio news.

For us, television supplanted radio as the medium of first choice for news (I was in fifth grade when JFK was murdered and I can still see that grainy footage on the mental projector. Later, that clip was joined by the shooting of a 'Viet Cong' soldier during the Tet Offensive when one Vietnamese shot another in the head, while he stood there, impassively, as television cameras rolled and both of those clips are on the same reel with that September morning in 2001 that has the large passenger jet disappearing into the World Trade Tower and never coming out. And there's an excellent probability that two of three clips I just listed happened BEFORE you were born which shows you how well old people grasp the time-space continuum).
As we've aged (or matured, though not in my case) and our culture has changed, more and more of us turn to 'the web' (I just saw the other day, where else, but on the web, the next generation of Internet will be arriving shortly and will, depending on whom you're reading, be either the Approaching Apocalypse or make what we have now as quaint as high-button shoes (not to be confused with high top sneakers, at upwards of a hundred bucks a pair, doncha know?)).

All of these messages, media and methods of delivery, to varying degrees, just wash over us and our children who have less familiarity with the 'old' media, especially radio (which is now either all-talk, on AM, because talk is a very cheap format to operate with little overhead in terms of other-than-salary expenses or all music, on FM and now satellite) and who've come of age with so many technological innovations they don't have any real means of distinguishing real from surreal or staged. And as we continue to age, our ability to pick up on this starts to get worn down as well until the lines blur and it becomes harder and harder to figure out what is news, what is a news release (propaganda to be harsh), and/or what's just buzz. Instead of relying on the well-dressed people behind the TV news desks to be gatekeepers for what's important in our world, we've allowed them to just back the news van up to the house and dump all kinds of junk into the living room. On an average day, we can sample stories about Britney Spears, the President's State of the Union address, a murder-suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan, a civil war in Kenya, the Writers' Guild Strike, genocide in Dafur and Lindsay Lohan out on bail.
You be the judge. It must all be important, right? It's on TV and on the web and now we've got the ability to tell each other about this 'stuff' and send 'clips' to each other's phones.

With more means to access information than at any time in the history of our species, since we've had a history of our species, how is it that we know so little so often and so much of the time? Gather around the electric fire tonight and bask in the cold glow of its illumination. A lot of light-but no heat. If guns don't kill people, do TV remotes? Are we adding a new and sinister meaning to 'batteries not included'?
-bill kenny