Dumb and Dumber, Watching TV

By Alan Caruba

I am pretty sure that, in their heyday, the Three Stooges, were looked down upon as low comedy by some folks. To this day, I still do. The truth is, however, even chimpanzees yuck it up when one of their fellow primates falls out of the tree. Since we share a great deal of our DNA in common with them it should come as no surprise that many people tune into “America’s Funniest Home Videos” to watch other people sustain a variety of injuries and humiliations.

In these horrid times, we all need a bit of entertainment and a few laughs, but it is hard for me to scan the evening’s television schedule without concluding that what passes for popular culture these days suggests that our collective IQs are scraping the bottom percentiles.

I will skip the usual stuff on the networks. Cops, lawyers, physicians are the stuff of most TV dramas from its earliest days. Many of these shows are well written, acted, and produced. The situation comedies, however, are the lowest, most vulgar stuff imaginable. The animated versions, “The Simpsons”, “Family Guy” or “American Dad” are generally cringe-worthy and, if you think about it, a wholesale attack on everything society generally regards as virtues. If you tear them down, what is left?

A show like “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” gets a bunch of fairly smart kids together and some really dumb adults to demonstrate how much they have forgotten or never learned when they were in fifth grade. There is a serious aspect to the question it asks.

I once wrote that if you wanted to lower your IQ, you should just watch the so-called History Channel, but to that I would have to add Animal Planet with shows like “American Stuffers” featuring a taxidermist and folks who had Fido and Fifi stuffed so they can be around in perpetuity. One can only hope they don’t feel the same way about the rest of their family.

This is the same channel that insists on broadcasting shows whose theme is that aliens from outer space are responsible for teaching the ancient Egyptians or Incas how to build pyramids. Let me repeat that, aliens from outer space! On a similar note, if the National Geographic channel keeps telling us that global warming is real, it should be dragged into court and heavily fined for every time it repeats this hoax.

Moving along, Animal Planet offers “Gator Boys” and the incomparable “Finding Bigfoot.” Why anyone would waste a minute’s time looking for Bigfoot defies the imagination, but watching them do so is comparable to announcing that you have reached a level of stupidity that embarrasses everyone who knows you.

Some shows are a category unto themselves like “Jersey Shore” in which a colony of morons is created solely for the purpose of providing viewers the satisfaction of saying they are not as stupid as the people they’re watching. There are gradations of this formula such as “The Real Housewives of” wherever, “The Bachelor”, etc.

I keep wondering when people who watch these shows will realize that “reality TV” has the same relationship to reality as junk mail does to a notice of eviction.

Over at TLC you can watch “Extreme Couponing” and shows about demented people who hoard everything until they are dragged from their homes for fear the stuff will fall and kill them. It’s mental illness as entertainment.

The ultimate channel for unremitting stupidity is TrueTV. They run “The Dumbest” series as a constant reminder that people who look and sound remarkably like your friends or relatives are morons. It’s truly a global thing as the clips come from all over. If you want to lose all hope for the future of the human race, watch this series.

I have come to suspect that far too much of what passes for “entertainment” on television is produced and aired by people who are convinced that if they provided anything intelligent, they would be off the air in days, if not hours. This stuff is an insult to the intelligence of most people, many of whom are smart enough to be doing something else to pass the time.

There was a book titled “They Became What They Beheld” and I am concerned that television is turning too many people—young and old—into complete, mouth-breathing trolls. It says a lot about our short attention spans and national mood swings during this election year.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Goodbye, Glenn Beck

By Alan Caruba

Back in August 2010, just after Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” evangelical extravaganza in front of the Lincoln Memorial, I wrote a commentary titled, “The Great Glenn Beck-a-Palooza.” Summing up the event, I said, “I think it was about Glenn Beck. And that’s a shame.”

Among the Fox News Channel’s anchors, even Bill O’Reilly tries to keep the show about the issues of the day, as does Mike Huckabee and others, but The Glenn Beck Show was always about Glenn Beck no matter what its topic-de-jour might be. It was about his emoting, a thoroughly insincere humility, and, just beneath the surface, his apocalyptic vision of the future.

I am not arguing that Beck didn’t do a good job connecting the dots and, in particular, exposing the communists in the Obama administration, the George Soros connections to the President, the perfidy of the “community organizers” calling themselves Acorn, or any of the other links regarding a White House that threatens the nation’s future.

I got a lot of flack after I wrote, “I cannot muster the same confidence I do when others address the same topics. Veering back and forth between outrage and tears, I find him creepy.”

I wasn’t surprised on Wednesday, April 6th, when he announced he would be leaving, moving on to new ventures after a scant two years. Television industry insiders noted that Beck was unable to attract or retain the advertising necessary to sustain the show on air. That, I suggest, is “the invisible hand” of the marketplace at work. What advertiser would want his product tied to such an essentially silly person?

Beck was relentlessly silly in his manner of presentation, not in the content of what he was presenting. I recall thinking that he regarded his viewers as a room full of pre-school kids that needed to be constantly stimulated with various gimmicks to keep their attention.

I never felt that a full-grown adult was on screen, but rather that I was watching a bi-polar manic depressive swinging wildly between moments of hyper-glee and hyper-fear. Watching him was always slightly exhausting and sanity did not return until Bret Baier came on with the Special Report at 6 PM Eastern.

“I took the job two years ago,” said Beck, “because I thought I had something important to share. I really thought if I could prove my case that something wicked this way was coming, something in America was wrong, America would listen. And they have.”

Beck said, “I believe we’re heading into deep and treacherous waters,” but America exists and always has existed in a dangerous world.

We stood strong through nearly fifty years of a Cold War that followed the cataclysm of World War II. We have weathered more than two decades of the greatest hoax ever perpetrated, “global warming.” And we are now trying to cope with the fanaticism of an Islamic revolution sweeping across the Middle East and threatening the entire world.

Sensing the threat that Barack Obama poses to the nation, voters cleaned house in the House of Representatives, reduced the number of Democrats in the Senate, and now wait to complete the job in 2012. No riots in the streets, just the steady application of the electoral process to correct an error.

Beck will do some “specials” with Fox News Channel and pursue other avenues to express his apprehensions, but soon he will not have an hour’s time every weekday to ricochet between giggles and tears to do it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Television Teaches Children

By Alan Caruba

The other evening, Neal Cavuto of Fox News closed out his hour with a discussion of his view that television commercials make men look stupid in order to sell products. I agree. The only ones that don’t look like idiots are trying to sell you gold, but even Geico features a very smart little Gekko with a fairly dim older gentleman as his foil.

I often give thanks that I grew up at a time before movies were overtaken by TV as the medium that taught little boys how to be big boys. Our icon was John Wayne and he never disappointed us, even when in his last film, “The Shootist”, he died in a gunfight after dispatching the bad guy.

His advice to a young boy in that film was as close to defining manhood as one can get. His character, John Bernard Brooks, said, “I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them.”

John Wayne and many other leading men of his era unabashedly displayed the qualities little boys wanted to acquire. The “Western” was quintessentially a story about America and, as in the case of “High Noon”, they were about the necessity for courage when it is not to be found in others around you.

The Talmud of the ancient Jewish sages taught, “Where there are no men, strive to be a man.”

I was there at the beginning of television as a mass means of entertainment. It began by borrowing heavily from shows that had been popular on radio and just as Cavuto noted for commercials, those shows frequently portrayed men as foolish or childish. There were radio shows like The Life of Riley, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Jack Benny. Not all were about men. George Burns and Gracie Allen featured a ditsy wife. Thank heavens for I Love Lucy and later The Golden Girls.

As TV sitcoms developed, however, it was usually the man that needed a lot of help. Hilarious, but setting the pace was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Happily, it was followed by the Mary Tyler Moore Show, but that funny gal was surrounded by men of dubious intelligence, not the least of whom was the marvelously funny, egomaniac anchorman, Ted Baxter. “Cheers” featured an entire cast of hopelessly inept men.

Indeed, whether it was men or women, the message of television, then and now, the secret that was kept from children of an earlier era was that grownups, adults, too frequently act like children!

Don't get me wrong. We need to be able to laugh at ourselves. It is a saving grace.

The vast difference between children of the television era and earlier was that earlier times demanded much more of children. Even today, the children of farmers learn the value of chores and skills that their contemporaries must wait into their late teens to acquire. All the way through college years, and beyond, young people too often learn little of the attitudes necessary to function as an adult.

Mark Twain said, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." Television, I fear, teaches children from an early age that all parents are essentially fools, no more to be respected than one’s peers.

On December 7, 1941, a lot of very young men and women became adults overnight following the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the United States into World War Two. We call them “the greatest generation” because they put aside childish ways and assumed the defense of the nation, of freedom.

America is fortunate to have courageous young men and women today. I only wish there were more of them.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Tonight's TV Schedule. What to Watch?

By Alan Caruba

Decisions, decisions. What to watch tonight? Turns out that, starting on Monday, all the television networks have decided that 10 PM is soon enough to go live at the Democrat Convention. This means most viewers will still be able to watch NBC’s “Deal or No Deal.”

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of both conventions!

As for watching either or both, it’s more like watching a very long infomercial because that’s what political conventions have become. I suspect most Americans are quite unaware that prior to the television age, they were contentious affairs that often required many ballots before a nominee would be selected. They were smoke-filled, the booze flowed freely, and you couldn’t find a woman on the convention floor because they didn’t gain the right to vote until 1920. It took that long for the national woman’s suffrage movement to get a constitutional amendment passed and ratified.

We’ve had two women as Secretary of State in recent years and any number of Cabinet Secretaries since the days of FDR. We have a complete idiot as Speaker of the House and now they want one to be President! I’m telling you, it’s scary!

The conventions today are carefully scripted with the main speakers having been told what topic to address as opposed to speaking about something that might really matter to them. I am pretty sure that Bill Clinton would like to give a speech on his eight years in office, skipping over the impeachment part, but alas he will have to swallow his pride and hurt feelings to mouth some inanities about how great it is to be supporting Barack Obama. Hillary, too, will have to hold back her tears and tell her delegates to vote for that black guy who stole the nomination from her.

If you don’t want to sit through the entire session that will be provided on public television channels, you can turn to either “Prison Break” or “High School Musical”, “Decision House” or “Gossip Girl.” Any one of these would make for some light diversion from a succession of speeches about how totally fabulous Barack Obama is. We already know how fabulous he is. All we need do is read his autobiography.

Jerome Corsi gives another version in “Obama Nation” that includes some very inconvenient truths.

Presumably, the McCain campaign will be the “Gossip Girl” to provide some juicy items for us to contemplate. They have already had to respond to Madonna’s comparison of John McCain to Hitler. This is what we have come to expect from liberals.

It’s the same with the current Democrat mantra that McCain owns seven houses. He owns a home in Sedona, Arizona. I doubt he has ever stepped foot in the other real estate investments that are owned by his wife of 29 years. Apparently, being married to a wealthy wife is only acceptable if you’re John Kerry.

Oddly, the Democrats will be campaigning hard against anyone who’s rich. Millionaires = bad. Minimum wage workers = good. What this ignores is that those workers all want to be millionaires and, in America, they have a fair chance of achieving that dream. Obama has made it clear that, if elected, he wants to tax the daylights out of anyone or any couple making enough to own a home or put a kid through college these days.

I’m guessing, but I think that network ratings for the Democrat Convention will fall well below those for the recently completed Olympics. This may well be the case for the Republicans too. We have all been through a year of primary elections and are in count-down mode to get the national elections behind us.

I’m thinking that documentary on wild giraffes battling for mating rights should be interesting this evening.

Call It Quits, Andy Rooney!

By Alan Caruba

One of the great mysteries of television is why someone at CBS hasn’t sat down with Andy Rooney and told him to clean out his desk. He is, after all, an irrelevant old man who shows up at the end of every edition of “Sixty Minutes” to rant about things of no significance whatever.

Now, I am old, too, but at least I try to pay attention to what is actually happening in the world and provide some kind of comment that might prove helpful. Rooney spent his few minutes of fame blathering about news stories and their headlines that didn’t interest him. That’s right, he talked about things he didn’t care about.

I don’t normally watch “Sixty Minutes.” I had the show on as background “white noise” because I was reading a book and the baby in the apartment next to mind was wailing away as only babies can do. The phone rang and I had the pleasure of chatting with one of the most brilliant minds in America, a resident of Falcon, Missouri, who finds the current political scene too joyful for words as Hillary and Bill Clinton finally use up whatever little credibility they ever had.

As I hung up the phone, there was the craggy visage of Andy Rooney, leaning forward and snarling at the TV camera, i.e., the viewers, to pass a few minutes asking inane questions such as what platinum is used for. That question was occasioned by the fact that its price, along with gold and other minerals, is going through the roof. So, Andy, it must be used for something! You could Google the answer.

Hear my plea, CBS-TV! Designate some intern to hand Rooney his walking papers. He stopped being entertaining or informative sometime shortly after Watergate. Nobody that dense should be allowed on television.

Real Murderers Cry A Lot

By Alan Caruba

I don’t watch television like other people do. When you spend your days writing, your mind needs to relax to a point where it is not processing a lot of information. I can’t remember the last time I watched an entire football game or even a movie. I want television to teach me something while, frankly, entertaining me.

I tend, therefore, to watch the History Channel, Animal Planet, Discovery, and C-Span on the weekends when they feature authors. I have been a book reviewer for over four decades and I read a lot. Like I said, I like learning things.

Lately I have become addicted to “The First 48” a reality show on A&E. If you are not familiar with it, in Memphis, Phoenix, Dallas or Miami, a camera team follows around real detectives from the minute a call comes in regarding a murder. There are no staged events. We merely get to watch as they attempt to solve the murder and, in their world, the first 48 hours after a killing is crucial to finding the killer.

I have also been a fan of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and what is most striking is the vast difference between the fictional show—which is well written and well acted—and real life is how little forensics, other than the most obvious such as the fortuitous fingerprint or shell casings, play a role in finding killers in the real world.

Things like eye witnesses, license plate numbers, descriptions of automobiles, and especially cell phones and the records they leave behind, play a key role, but almost inevitably, the suspects are already in the crime records, their photos instantly staring back from the computer screen and their “rap sheets” carefully documenting a life of bad decisions when their names are typed into the system.

Another factor common to almost every murder is drugs. And, finally, virtually all the victims are either Black or Hispanic. They live in bad neighborhoods, often home to gangs. Their killers are also Black or Hispanic. White people kill each other, too, of course, but the week-to-week program reveals a world that those of us raised in nice, white, middle, and upper class suburban neighborhoods never see.

How are the killers found? As often as not their family members give them up, providing the information necessary to find them. Sometimes it’s their girl friends or guys with whom they hang out. They are often in their teens or twenties. It is the rare old man who kills anyone, though the show had shown one such case.

Finally, killers tend to cry a lot when they are caught. I found that surprising. In the fictional world of killers, they’re tough as nails, but in the real world, they tend to cry before and during the interrogation. The questions detectives ask are almost too simple. “Tell me what happened?” The lies are so pathetic one understands why these people are unable to envision going to jail for decades. Confronted, they just spill the beans.

The detectives are an eclectic group, both men and women, but they have one thing in common. As difficult and demanding as the job is, they just love it. Their client is the victim. I never watch the show without being very thankful for cops.

In America’s big cities, somebody is killing somebody all the time. That’s the nature of cities. People feel anonymous, but they’re not. They have family and friends. Until they kill somebody and then nobody wants them around.