PLANES, TRAINS, and INTELLECT DRAINS

by Leigh Lundin

Once upon a time, good manners dictated we shut off the television when company visits. These days, some think it’s impolite not to have a television going while entertaining guests.

No, this isn’t a rant against television; this is a complaint about the ubiquity of mindless TV. English law says that the right to swing your fist extends only as far as the next man’s nose. Smoking laws now protect non-smokers from cancerous fumes in public, but we who value our mental faculties have no protection against carcinogenic television.

I know people who like to have a television on as background noise. I have acquaintances who can’t sleep without a television on. Polls have shown that given such a choice, children would rather give up their friends than forego television. Beyond TV as babysitter, it’s a constant companion for many adults.

Televisions are everywhere: lobbies, elevators, bars, and lunch counters. My bank has multiple screens, one that at least shows CNN and others that alternate headlines with banking services ads. Orlando Lynx busses have televisions that serve a vaguely helpful purpose: The screens quietly display the route map and bus-stop information interspersed with headlines, a rare combination of utility and silence. (I hope the sound system wasn’t simply broken.)

Even when they’re unwatchable, televisions are omnipresent. For those parents who don’t want to interact with their children, TVs can be found in the seatbacks of SUVs. They drop down from airline overhead compartments. They’re in iPhones. They’re in your face and in your ear, electronic body-snatchers competing to take over as much as your life as possible. (Cue Halloween’s leftover Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.)

In addition to the usual “Does television propagate mindlessness or does mindlessness propagate television?” I’d love to conduct an experiment. In my experiment, subjects would watch Citizen Kane on any of the above followed by a comprehension test. I’d not wager on anyone passing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if viewers knew which creams preserve beauty, what pill is essential to their sex life, and how many flavors are in new, wholesome, Frostie-Os.

A funeral home could be the last place you might expect a television, but sure enough, I visited a mortuary and there in a drawing room sat a television. Moreover, a number of guys had gathered around its glow. “Yep, I miss poor brother Ernie, but… Whoa! Did you see that tackle! Man, I figure Green Bay…”

Your doctor’s office almost certainly has a television or two. I have a hypothesis that (a) television causes anxiety in people, (b) anxiety causes hypertension and headaches, (c) hypertension causes doctors to write scrips, (d) filling prescriptions causes an increase in pharmaceutical company profits, (e) drug companies reward physicians, and (f) with a result that more doctors agree to plug in more televisions.

In one clinic, if the girls couldn’t hear the television though their glass partition, they didn’t think it was loud enough. It wasn’t even *real* television, but an on-going infomercial interspersed with FEMA-like fake interviews and plummy voices that urged, “So ask your doctor for the little polka-dot pill.” I asked an office girl to shut the obnoxious thing off.

“No, we have to keep it on for legal reasons.”

Legal? Contractual, perhaps. Hypnotize your waiting room with our infomercials and we’ll send you to Cancun for a week.

“How about turning if off for the comfort and well-being of your patient?”

“We can’t do that, sir. We’re obligated to keep it on at all times.”

And blaring too, no doubt. I wanted to say, “How about you come out here and try to read and I’ll lounge back in your office and do my nails.”

Have you looked closely at your doctor’s television? Chances are it’s in a cabinet designed to prevent the TV being turned off. That’s because of people like me who, when alone in a waiting room, shut the damn things off.

Consumer tip (heh heh): Cabinets can’t necessarily prevent TVs from being unplugged.

Foreigners consider 24/7 television saturation largely an American phenomenon. I know of at least one international airport that offers domestic travelers work desks, wi-fi and free dial-up, play areas for kids, and quiet lounge areas. In the American departure section they offer… nonstop television.

In parts of the US, passenger trains have ‘quiet cars’, conveyances in which televisions, boom boxes, cell phones, Game Boys, and audible conversations are forbidden. Unfortunately, the rules don’t extend to the rail stations themselves.

At 03:50 while traveling last week– that’s ten to four in the morning, I found myself aging six hours in a chilly train station waiting area sitting on– get this– ceramic tile benches. As might be expected, ceramic benches are cold and hard, but this one had the additional feature of a protruding wooden plank upon the seat back that cut into the spine.

(I’ll leave the rail station unnamed, but if you’re thinking
Richmond-sadomasochistic-Virginia, you could be right.)

So: 3:50 AM, cold waiting room, ceramic tile seating, a Torquemada torture plank, and six hours to go… What else could they dream up? Of course– a blaring television to prevent sleeping altogether.

With only two others in the hall (central casting might have called them Miss Marple and Mike Hammer), it didn’t take much to come up with a consensus. I took the attendant’s broom, reached up and punched off the button, and we three settled in to doze as well as we could. Ten minutes later, the ticket agent strolled through and said brightly, “Oh! Surely you want the television on!”

“No,” we said as a group. “Surely we don’t.”

“But,” she said, “others might.” She pulled out a remote control and switched it on again.

Common clerk mentality dictates that if you want no television, you must be about to go postal (which might become self-fulfilling, if they continue to leave it on). Wanting the television off is… well, un-American and somehow dangerous. I expect any day now, we’ll hear reporters say, “He was a loner and rumor has it (gasp!) he didn’t much like television.”

Rather than random and usually brainless television, those of us reading this probably prefer to read. I keep a paperback in the car for solitary lunches, whether I eat at Taco Bell or Ruby Tuesday. I carry two paperbacks in my traveling shoulder bag along with my laptop. I have stacks of books by my bed and a couple on my desk.

Of course I watch television, too: The History and Discovery Channels, 60 Minutes, Criminal Minds, PBS Mystery, and if they produced it, I’d watch CSI:Bithlo.

Bithlo: It’s one of those rural villages that other Floridians like to contrast themselves against, thinking Look how far we’ve come. Every region has its Bithlo.

Personally, I think Bithlo’s highly advanced, having neither a plane, train, or doctor’s waiting room, nor any intention of installing a TV in one.