tv land

(Originally posted on a political discussion board at BeliefNet.com.)

It's with fear and anxiety sometimes that I enter the old BNet fun-house hall of mirrors, this airless purgatory of exhausted sperm donors (James Wolcott's phrase -- damn him!), this Never-Never land where if you wish upon a star, your most cherished dreams of torturing people and running them out of the country on red-hot rails will come true, to try to make sense of the increasingly grossening bigotry-fueled gibberish that substitutes for political discussion around here.

And the first thing I stumbled into coming here this hour, on this thread, was the indignant snort that critics of the Sacred and Most High Fox News Network should get their info about that holy sepulchre of Brownshirt propaganda and urging on the Baggers from the original source, and not "liberal" blogs.

Well, what about direct quotes and transcripts? Do they count?

'Cause they're gonna have to do.

See, you have to understand that even if I did own a TV, which thank God I don't, but even if I did, I wouldn't watch it. I like the universe I'm living in. It's real, and it's full of real, three-dimensional people and animals, with whom I can interact, mostly pleasantly, sometimes not so pleasantly. On TV, there are nothing but two-dimensional cardboard-cutout people on a flat screen. it's an alternative universe, and I don't want to be in any alternative universe, especially one so loud and shrill and stupid and endlessly repetitive as TV land. Not even for five minutes.

And I can also assure you that knowing that some TV is worse than other TV, you would have to pry the remote control device from my cold, dead, stiff hands and force my corpse at gunpoint to sit still for Fox News, with its verbal tweetings and chirpings from a grotesquerie like Ms. Palin, or the disgusting and degrading bully-boy routine of Bill O', or the psychotically boiling rage total flip outs of Mr. Beck. Been there. Once. Seen it. Won't go again.

If this is what passes for serious political perspective, we're in a lot of trouble.