Pawns

In a great many things, I’m pretty much a “middle-of-the-road” guy. I believe in moderation, common sense, and personal responsibility. I’m a pragmatist.

Take television, for example. It’s often fashionable in certain circles that I frequent to pooh-pooh television as garbage, the lowest common denominator, something for the common folk to watch, something that’s beneath anyone with advanced sensibilities. I think that’s bullshit.

Television, without a doubt, has a tremendous amount of absolute garbage on it. “Honey Boo-Boo” is my vision of hell, just about anything on MTV is stupid enough to make you weep for humanity, and I don’t even want to start on soap operas or the tabloid shows that obsess over the Kardashians and the teeny bopper celebrity de jour.

I think the vast, overwhelming majority of “reality TV” falls into the category of “utter tripe” – but then there are “Mythbusters” and “Dirty Jobs” and “NOVA”.

The classic sitcom is terrible, with fake laugh tracks, stale jokes, and stereotypical characters – but then there’s “M*A*S*H” and “Big Bang Theory” and “Modern Family”.

The cookie-cutter cop shows are a dime a dozen, most of them “ripped from today’s headlines” or “mismatched buddy cop” variants – but then there’s “NYPD Blue”.

These days there are also horribly crappy shows made for the cable networks, like “Sharknado” and “Jackass” – but you also get “Breaking Bad”, “Game Of Thrones”, “Homeland”, “The Big C”, and so on.

Television and Twitter have a lot in common. It’s probably accurate for both to say that they are 98% or more total slime, stupidity, and infantile drivel. But that other couple of percent can be pretty amazing at times.

What the “TV is beneath me, I never watch it” argument misses is that YOU GET TO CHOOSE. You get to make intelligent and informed decisions if you so choose. No one’s holding a gun to your head to make you watch “Maury” or “TMZ Live”. There isn’t going to be a quiz tomorrow at a police checkpoint where you have to prove that you watched “The Bachelorette” finale. You’re not going to be a social pariah if you’re not up to date on the latest plot twist on “Days Of Our Lives”.

By being elitist, you’re denying yourself the potential to enjoy some truly marvelous storytelling and entertainment. By being elitist, you’re telling me that you’re not capable of making intelligent decisions on your own, so you’re going to cower behind a facade of fake intellectual superiority. By being elitist, you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then being stupid enough to be proud of it.

If you’re one of those elitists, what do you do for entertainment besides watch TV? Read books? Watch movies? Listen to music? Is every book, movie, and composition out there a gem, or do you get to pick the ones you want and ignore the ones that you don’t like? Or are you so busy in your life that you don’t have time for entertainment? If so, you have my sympathies, but you’re not living, you’re just existing. (And what are you doing reading this?)

So, in summary, I like to watch certain television shows that I really like and enjoy. Only now, I can’t watch some shows and events that I like due to circumstances that are completely beyond my control. And it’s really starting to get on my nerves.

In our part of Los Angeles, the cable TV monopoly has been granted to Time Warner Cable. As you may have heard, TWC and the CBS network are at war over how much TWC pays to CBS to re-transmit CBS shows to customers like me. As this has escalated, TWC has taken CBS (and all of its affiliated networks such as Showtime and the Smithsonian Channel) off of its cable systems in New York City, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

TWC, of course, is blaming CBS. “CBS is making outrageous demands for the right to continue carrying their channels.” We just got our TWC bill this month. With our full package of programming and internet access our bill is over $200 a month. TWC gave us a $3.67 credit for having Showtime pulled. WOWSERS! (And by “wowsers” what I mean is “What A Crock!!”)

CBS, of course, is blaming TWC. “Time Warner Cable has dropped CBS, you’re at risk of missing the NFL, US Open, and the new TV season on CBS.” I can’t even watch the shows online since my internet access is through TWC and CBS has “retaliated” by cutting off access to customers who access the internet through TWC. “Time Warner Cable Customers: Content Not Available”

The FCC and other regulatory agencies, of course, are doing absolutely nothing. Anyone who expected our “leaders” to “lead” should put on their dunce caps, go sit in the corner, and think about that for a while.

As someone who simply wants to watch football or the morning news or a favorite TV show, I DON’T CARE. I’m blaming EVERYONE. I don’t believe that CBS is trying to save me, the customer, from the big, bad, monopolistic cable oligarchy. I don’t believe that TWC is trying to protect my interest and keep my bill down.

(For one thing, if either CBS or TWC gave even the slightest sliver of a rat’s ass about me as a consumer, they would offer a la carte options so that I don’t have to pay for fifty-seven different shopping channels that I’ve never watched for a single second, or eighty-three Spanish channels when I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Does anyone see that happening any time in the next thousand years? Yeah, me neither.)

I’m really getting fed up with being a pawn, caught in the middle of a pissing contest between two multi-billion dollar multi-national conglomerates. I’m even more fed up with the constant smarmy, self-serving, “we’re doing it for you” bullshit from both sides. I don’t believe it, they don’t believe it, and no one else believes it. It’s worse than the propaganda spit out by political campaigns these days.

It would be such a relief if one of the CEO’s would get up to the podium and just say, “Yeah, we’re screwing you over. Tough shit, we don’t care. We know that you’ll come back and throw money at us when it’s over. This whole thing is nothing but an infantile contest to see who has the biggest dick and make a lot of lawyers rich. Please drop your pants, grab your ankles, and smile.”

Freakin’ idiots!

I just wish that we weren’t the bigger freakin’ idiots when we do exactly what the expect us to do. I wish there were another option other than using the “off” switch.

I wish there was a way to stop being a pawn.