Plugged in, tuned out

I haven't had cable in nearly six years, not counting a brief mistaken glance into the full spectrum provided a shady cable guy in the last town we lived in (it lasted one mind-numbing week and the very first image I saw was from HBO's "Cathouse," a reality show about a whorehouse, wherein a midget woman, a fat male trucker, and a beautiful sad black girl were listlessly re-enacting one of the kama sutra's more challenging poses. I didn't know whether to laugh or weep for all humanity).

But one of the conditions of moving to a town whose length and breadth are walkable in an evening stroll was that we take the plunge and sign up for that most American of rights: the right to veg out to other people's drama. And God, have I loved it.

One thing I've noticed though-- ours is a culture obsessed with pop psychology and calling in The Expert to preach the gospel of our inadequacies before a national audience for the trade-off of a quick fix answer to the problem. We can't get enough of it. "Honey, We're Killing the Kids," "Wife Swap," "Shalom in the Home," "What Not To Wear," "Ten Years Younger," "Celebrity Fitness Challenge," "The Bachelor," "Extreme Makeover"... people will submit to incredible amounts of embarassment and an epic invasion of privacy just for the glimmering promise that "after this week of intensive therapy/shopping/exercising/shameless copulating/plastic surgery" they will finally be stamped "Acceptable" and paraded before their families and friends as such.

Not that they're not good shows.

What's interesting is that we seem to have exhausted most of the fixable problems and now we've turned to our pets. I saw one yesterday morning called "Barking Mad," which was pretty much the UK version of "The Dog Whisperer," and it tracked the lives of Giles, a cat who pissed on electrical outlets, and Honey, a hamster who chewed everything and bit people. The hamster was my favorite. Honey was psychopathically depressed and afraid of humans, which was unfortunate since her owner had just gone through a divorce and was fond of tracking and hunting Honey for extensive cuddling.

As a solution, the show's host built Honey an elaborate, interactive hamster mansion where she could hide from her owner and chew on bells, leather, seeds, plastic, all kinds of shit. Honey was thrilled with this arrangement but her owner lamented, "It's great for her, but now there's no relationship," to which the host of the show rather roughly replied, "Honey doesn't need you. Her brain's just not wired that way."

This exchange echoed back to me a short two hours later when I found myself in a nearby town's mall fifteen minutes before most of the shops opened. I'd decided to go try on evening gowns for the upcoming, attendance-mandatory, military ball. The plan was to stroll around a bit while the shops opened, but it turned out that forty aerobically-attired seniors had the same idea, and they wanted to go FAST. Around and around and around they went, some grimly silent, some chatting happily, all swinging their arms and keeping to the exact contours of the labrynthine mall layout. Overhead Fleetwood Mac kept pace at an inoffensive volume. I sat down on a bench and tried to smile pleasantly as wave after wave passed me by. None of them even gave me a second glance, even the silent ones. "Honey doesn't need you. Her brain's just not wired that way."

I guess it's a nice way to get exercise. It's air-conditioned, there's music. There's lots of glittery stuff for sale and people to look at. But I think I finally get the British woman's comment now. Life goes so fast and so many things get hopelessly broken along the way. So much of what passes for entertainment these days is the frantic insistence on fixing these things-- FAST-- so you can hurry and get on with the rest of your life! It's no wonder we look for the smallest amount of comfort in something like an angry hamster, and truly grieve that comfort's loss.