Last night I thought seriously about the need to own a gun. I’ve owned guns before for various reasons…most of which were on the frontiers of sanity. Last night the notion started as a niggling twitch until it was a fully formed dementile. I need a gun to shoot the fucking T.V. . I’m generally neutral about T.V. even though I understand that I spend far too much time in front of it. Years ago I heard a lecture about how people used a T.V. guide to know when to turn the thing on…but there was no guide to tell you when to turn it off. In those days T.V. Guide was a small magazine that came out weekly and you could plan your entire week in front of the tube. It also seems to me that black and white T.V. was so much easier to ignore…and small screens. You could go blind watching those things…I’ve seen people pulling chairs closer and closer until two or three people were three feet away from the screen, like hunters gathered around a campfire. When colour and large screens came in…we were fucked. If they had introduced a porn channel right then (never woulda happened ) well, millions of young dudes would never have made it out of puberty alive. Colour somehow magnetized your eyeballs…grown up humans watched the most ridiculous shit because they couldn’t take their eyes off it. Think about it…in the early days when Winter’s frozen dark descended…the colour T.V. was always sunny and warm. If you sat close enough you could get a tan. Insidiously, the thing became part of the family. People used to sit across the table from each other to eat supper…now they sit side by side facing the T.V. And conversation has come to be a strange, three-way communication…People talk toward the screen, often referring to something on that screen…the words bounce off the screen to the person sitting two seats to the right, who then waits for a pause in the action to bounce a response back to the other guy. Oh, and thank god for the mute button…Now you can wait for a commercial…hit the mute and ask the wife about the in-laws or go for a beer.
Our elections have just climaxed (if that’s not too suggestive a term)…and the bombardment of shock and awe advertising has rumbled and snivelled to a halt. What passes for “shock and awe” in Canadian politics is a little less incendiary than it is in American politics. Still, it rises above the basic boredom of an afternoon cooking show from the U.K. for example. Apart from interrupting some of my favourite T.V. shows with rants about the “lousy, left-wing, terror-loving, liberals” or the “hopelessly corrupt, corporate-shill, right wing neo-con bastards) There were debates. I don’t know. What debates? What drug are these people on? How much prozac does it take to freeze a body that solid. Who wants to vote for one of these statues. But O,K. it’s over. We got rid of Caligula and his band of devoted sycophants…brought a shiny new young and crisp guy…handed a brown paper bag full of bird seed and bullshit and pointed him at the mess that Caligula made for the past ten years.
I thought I could relax…a bit…maybe watch a little of the World Cup of Rugby…Oh man…those cats are some brutal monsters…necks the size of my waist make them look like they got tiny little heads and they don’t wear pads or helmets. Slam into each other and pile on. Guys come out with broken noses streaming blood, torn ears, streaming blood, cut eyebrows, streaming blood. And all through the thing there’s the referee who apparently wants to make sure that opponents are polite to each other…”Dreadfully sorry, mate, I didn’t intend to dislocate your testicles” . Much better than than two months of political snooze fodder.
So…turn on the tube the other night and here’s a dozen Republican mumble-masters getting ready to debate. Oh no! Nice suits though…and there’s the obligatory woman…generally ignored in the testosterone tournament. They have the spectrum almost covered…a black guy who sounds all white red-neck, a hispanic who sounds New England, a Jersey boy who sounds like what he is and the third Bush…who sounds like a Sunday School teacher (and looks like one too) and then there’s the Donald. One never knows what the man is going to say…It’s his prevailing charm…an ability to avoid discriminating by offending every-one. I overheard someone saying that the Trumpster could go the distance if he cut his hair…but I thought, noooo…noo dude. He can’t do that. There’s nothing under there. It struck me that what the Republicans need, to cover the whole modern demographic, is a gay, muslim, black, woman in a wheelchair who was raised by a family of white methodists in South Dakota and who is married to a Mexican woman who’s waiting for her green card.
I managed to haul myself out of the cushions on the couch and snatched for the T.V. remote control…which spun away from my fingers and dove under the coffee table…damn, damn, double damn. And that’s when I thought I needed a gun…to shoot that fucking T.V.
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