~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I don’t have a television, but I have learned that when I’m around one, I am drawn into it. I’m a mosquito headed for carbon dioxide, sucked into whatever is there on that screen. I become a part of a need to watch what’s going on; I am suddenly a couch potato, a TV zombie, a mosquito stuck to the screen like a swatted bug.
Because we abide in the times we live in, all TV – MSNBC; BBC; NBC, ABC and CBS; Fox and all the rest of the cable crabs — is locked into the political circus; for this is 2016, the most outrageous, grandiose and stupid election cycle, as the pundits call it, of them all. The repetition is mind-numbing, but still, I don’t turn away, I don’t turn it off. I am caught in the mesmerizing trap of television that makes me believe absolutely that the next thing they say will be a revelation, perhaps even important.
In the meantime, these TV folks put me on edge with dire warnings: 25 years of Hillary lying [made up by the media who for some reason dislike strong, smart femmes; no word of 30 years of What’s His Name lying, cheating on both women and the government, totally involved with gold fixtures in hotel rooms and size 38D bras], Zica, murders, fires, prostitutes in general and politicians for sale, melting ice caps, bad bridges, chocolate/coffee/butter/wheat that is good for me today, look out for tomorrow; Russia is going to get us, if in fact China doesn’t, or North Korea; and the worst of all – America is not okay, even when we have increased employment and new businesses that are non-polluting and hiring folks because business is so good.
These TV folk tell me with happy faces that The Tower of Trump is pretty damn fab. Inside my wilting brain I know that I am caught in a weird web that’s known as television, but I’ve now moved from the Barcalounger and am lying on the couch, watching. These threatening news bulletins infect me with a low-grade fever called existential anxiety . . . meaning that my entire existence is riddled with a fear that will prob’ly never go away, a fear of something, or many things, all of which I can do next to nothing about.
Do you who watch TV on a regular basis have these problems?
After two and a half days of increasing yak-yak-yak about the frights of the world and the political mayhem known as America in a Presidential election period, and my shameful realization that I am unable to form a sentence longer than three words in answer to my children, I come to.
For reasons not clear, possibly fear of never returning to myself, I shut off the aptly named boob-tube and walk out the front door.
My brain, my soul are reinvigorated as I step down off the porch to the leaf-covered sidewalk. There are trees just beginning to turn, there are golden auburn mums in pots on front porches, white sheet ghosts hang in bushes above carved pumpkins; I hear birds tweeting instead of myself tweeting on my phone; I hear children laughing and playing tag in backyards; there is a sun.
I am free, no longer a dim-witted, eyes-glazed-over, led-by-the-nose person of lost mind and no purpose.
I take a tack that for reasons only one’s mind can know – three miles from my daughter’s home, on streets of Victorian painted-lady houses and hundred-foot-tall oaks – where I realize that I live in Shakespearean times, the wordplay of life delivered across the world, not just across the footlights.
Our daily doses (constant through the hours) of the high drama, hyperbole and hilarity of the news, the tweets and the debate took me right back to having to read William Shakespeare in school. At the time – I was a teenager — it was painful. Eventually, when I grew up (in my thirties), I learned to enjoy him.
Both his high-drama tragedies and his hilarious, mixed-up identity comedies are being rewritten for us and sent to us through the air 1,440 minutes a day on our iPhones and TVs; and then we get to contribute to it all with our own tweets and chats and blogs, along with The Great Tweeter in the Tower.
Who would have thought? Many of us want some kind of fame, now and after we die, probably more in this century than ever before. And perhaps because we can tweet, we’ll get it – fame — on a par with Willy, the most quoted fella in Western Civ. That Shakespeare did it all himself and that we’re collaborating with the entire tweeting world that is also watching the telly means that, really, we’re more like the Bible, also oft-quoted – which was penned by many people, not just one brilliant, funny, wise and obviously observant guy.
The light relief of Shakespeare’s comedies, and also a few of his sonnets, are apt reminders that we have to take life with a grain of salt, even when it contains a demagogue yelling at us several times a day, both on a mic and in actual written words – not too many of them (140 characters a tweet is a full thought process for some).
If I think too much about the male Presidential candidate’s general lack of knowledge except for things having to do with making money by not paying workers and declaring nearly a billion dollars in bad money deals so there will be no annoyance of having to pay taxes for the next two decades, I go a little crazy. Even the poorly educated, whom he loves and who say they need jobs and something else. . .oh, yes– no more people allowed in. . . are nervously laughing now.
If I can maintain a sense of humor — a kind of Shakespearean slapstick mentality, but humor nonetheless — I’ll probably get through this. Knowing that at home I don’t have a TV, so I’m safer there than when visiting my children, I can survive because I have only to stay here for the wedding; I can – and will — be strong against the lure of the tube, as well as the oaf.
After watching so much television for two and a half days hoping for the best and knowing inside me that it was not working for me, however much I thought I loved it and needed it at the time (does this define drug addiction?), I am relieved to have remembered my real hero, Will Shakespeare, 1564-1616.
Ah, the fame, the longevity of that man Shakespeare. If the particular demagogue of our era lasts in the history books at all, he will not be on the front pages with Will, but lumped back there with Atilla, or Hitler, for sure in the modern era, Howdy Doody. Or maybe the fool, the one character Shakespeare always included, the player who is not expected to know better, who is a rejection of the society into which he was born.
I am concentrating on being neither mean nor unkind, just observant, like Will; not as good at it, but still, as he did, I observe the human comedy and tragedy and I write down the players on the stage. One of our cast of characters, one who thinks he thinks bigger than anyone, believes that he is the only one on the stage and that we’re all looking.
I for one am tired of his role and am no longer looking or listening. This is it. I am relegating whatever it is that I hear of or from him to laughter. As a medicine. The best medicine being – turn it off, tune it out; otherwise, we will all get mean or crazy or both.
Long live Shakespeare – well, he’s already proved his worth. As to that other guy, he’s already a dead duck, a limp quacker.
