When I was a child I loved to read TV Guide. I loved the gritty cheap paper, the way the pages rustled against each other as I riffled through each week, looking for especially artsy films I couldn't begin to understand, or checking for ABC After School Specials. I liked the little red-n-white television set in the corner of the cover, the tightly packed row after row of channel, program, date, time, and movie star minutiae that filled every single page.
More than the Guide, I loved TV. All of it. I even loved ABC Wide World of Sports with Jim McKay and his Timex watches, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (I wanted one of Jim Fowler's cool safari jackets with the handy pockets), Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Midnight Express and Soul Train, (RIP Don Cornelius)...you name it, I would watch it.
Fast forward forty-plus years and I still have plenty of television pleasures--I indulge in my fair share of ESPN, American Idol, What Not to Wear, and Kelly (she just keeps getting thinner, poor thing). Bottom line: a television prude I am not.
But tonight I came across some mildly unobtrusive, even reserved, words penned in 1938 and they gave me pause.
"...I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world....We shall stand or fall by television--of that I am quite sure." E.B. White
Television as we know it didn't even exist in 1938. E.B. White was a fairly well-connected man--and somehow those connections had, two years earlier, provided him with the rare opportunity to observe the transmission of sound and image from one room to another.
The observation of that naive little transfer a mere handful of feet was enough for White's no-nonsense New England mind to grasp the global magnitude of this new invention and to question what we, in our childishly grasping need to be pacified, would become.
White goes on to note, succinctly and without melodrama, that with the addition of the Elsewhere, we will become ever more oblivious to the Here, to the what, to the why, of our own daily lives. Because if it's there, of course we have to look.
As they say on GMA, what's everybody going to be talking about at the water cooler? I don't want to be the one lone dweeb, standing there clutching my sad little cup of break room coffee, with no idea who made it to Hollywood, or who got a rose, or who hit the three-pointer at the buzzer. Not me.
And here is what I miss:
And this:
And, more importantly, this:
Fast forward forty-plus years and I still have plenty of television pleasures--I indulge in my fair share of ESPN, American Idol, What Not to Wear, and Kelly (she just keeps getting thinner, poor thing). Bottom line: a television prude I am not.
But tonight I came across some mildly unobtrusive, even reserved, words penned in 1938 and they gave me pause.
"...I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world....We shall stand or fall by television--of that I am quite sure." E.B. White
Television as we know it didn't even exist in 1938. E.B. White was a fairly well-connected man--and somehow those connections had, two years earlier, provided him with the rare opportunity to observe the transmission of sound and image from one room to another.
The observation of that naive little transfer a mere handful of feet was enough for White's no-nonsense New England mind to grasp the global magnitude of this new invention and to question what we, in our childishly grasping need to be pacified, would become.
White goes on to note, succinctly and without melodrama, that with the addition of the Elsewhere, we will become ever more oblivious to the Here, to the what, to the why, of our own daily lives. Because if it's there, of course we have to look.
As they say on GMA, what's everybody going to be talking about at the water cooler? I don't want to be the one lone dweeb, standing there clutching my sad little cup of break room coffee, with no idea who made it to Hollywood, or who got a rose, or who hit the three-pointer at the buzzer. Not me.
And here is what I miss:
And this:
And, more importantly, this:
There will be a sunset today. The buttercups are popping out, a little early. And your kids are just a button or glance away. The birds are chirping outside in the sunshine. Life is grand.
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