>---
>How is it that Taibbi and Ames described life in the US? 50 channels of
>porn, and nobody ever actually having sex.
I believe this makes my point.
If There Were No TV in America... by Matt Taibbi After the Ostankino fire two weeks ago, the Russian newspaper Vremya-Novosti called the eXile and commissioned an article on the theme, “What Would Happen If Television Was Turned Off in America?” This was our answer, which they published last week:
On the first night there would be two sounds on the streets: breaking glass, and the incessant ringing of security alarms. Even in relatively affluent neighborhoods, whites and blacks alike would be turning cars over, and setting fires at random. Everywhere people running, pandemonium, investment bankers carrying stolen televisions... A mounted policeman lies on the ground, pinned under his horse, which is shot through the neck; he calls for backup over his radio, but no help is forthcoming... panic reigns...
On the first night without television in the United States, President Clinton would declare the entire country a federal disaster area. He might even be forced to impose martial law. That’s because life as we know it would cease to exist in the United States without television. Without television, Americans would be forced to think for themselves. Forced to think for themselves, they vast majority would lose their minds within the space of a few hours. Long-suppressed feelings of resentment and rage would escape the collective unconscious and leap to the surface, and soon—and this is why Clinton would have to declare martial law—an already extremely well-armed civilian population would become irrational, belligerent, even homicidal, a handful for all but the best-trained armies in the world to cope with.
In Russia, the temporary absence of television of the sort which we experienced last week was certainly a supreme annoyance, but it was hardly a catastrophe the same kind of incident would represent in the U.S. This is not only because Russians are intrinsically tougher, more able to handle crises and more dulled to disaster than their American counterparts, who have never suffered a war on their own territory and frequently live to the age of 40 without ever once peeling a potato. It is also because the Russian people, as a whole, are in much better psychological health than Americans, who in many cases are just a few hours of enforced boredom away from extreme psychotic episodes.
In Russia, surprisingly large numbers of people have lives outside of their jobs. Many have parents who live nearby, wives who cook at home, friends who are welcome to come over to visit unannounced, and acquaintances who they will share a bottle of vodka with for no particular reason. Furthermore—and this is something that most Americans would find revolutionary—there are even a great many Russians who have living grandparents who they actually visit voluntarily, even when it is not Christmas or New Year’s.
In the United States we keep our elderly in special concentration camps, in Florida, where they are fed regularly and wheeled back and forth between bed and the television room by burly black attendants who are well paid for their jobs. The residents don’t know it, but these elderly “rest homes” are surrounded by electrified fences and moats full of hungry alligators. Just in case, you know. In America visiting grandma generally means sending a hastily written postcard to the camp address in Florida, then throwing out her tear-stained return letter without opening it, when it comes back in the mail a few days later.
It’s true, some young Americans do marry. But few young people know how to cook these days, so most couples go to restaurants more or less every night. Home, when they are there together, is a place for sleeping and for watching television. Guests are rare and not particularly welcome. Since no one cooks at home, there is no reason to have guests; if you need to see somebody, you can meet him at a restaurant. On the rare occasion one does have a guest over, it is because you want to watch something on television together.
Television. By the year 2000, it has come to be thought of by Americans as their great reward for adherence to the social contract. The other part of that contract includes the need to work all the time, in perpetual terror of losing one’s job and not having as much money as your neighbor. We Americans (and this is happening in Russia now, too) are exposed to thousands of advertisements and messages every day which teach us to hate ourselves—for not having a perfect body like Cindy Crawford, for not owning a Lexus, for having teeth which are slightly yellow, for being too pale, for sneezing, menstruating, having bad breath, and having less sex than the people on MTV... in short, for being human. If you listen to all of these messages, the solution to all your problems is always money. If you have money, you can buy all the breath mints you want, drive a Lexus, join an expensive health club, hang out with Brad Pitt, have a whole warehouse full of Always pads, and vacation in Bermuda to get some color in your skin.
So you need money. Lots of it. And in order to make money in the United States, you must work 70 hours a week or more, stuck in a tiny carpet-lined cubicle with a telephone headset fixed on your head. Usually you are working for some evil corporation which forces you not only to spend all your energy trying to get people to buy things they don’t need, but insists that you pretend at all times that you love your work and hate the idea of leaving at night to go home. And if you think you can relax a little on the job, be careful. Most American companies now read every single e-mail you write from your office computer. If you spend your time surfing the internet, you have to be careful there, too. Many companies today use a program called Spector (or one like it), which watches and records which internet sites their employees look at during the work day. Incidentally, Americans at home are beginning to use similar programs to spy on the surfing habits of their fellow family members. The husband who watches to see which golden-shower-and-plating chat room his wife is visiting is the most common of these domestic spies.
The people who have these jobs are lonely. They have no one to drink or do drugs with, even if they wanted to. Sex for most Americans is an inaccessible thing, something that only happens on “Santa Barbara” or other TV shows and movies. In real life, Americans rarely have sex, and even then seldom enjoy it.
That leaves work and television as the only real occupations in life. Work is the one acceptable vice in America; people are encouraged to be greedy. TV is the only acceptable escape. In other countries people drink, have affairs, raise children. Americans no longer raise children, because they take too much time away from work. Babies cry while you are trying to iron a shirt for a meeting. They make you come home at eight-thirty, while the guy in the office next to you, who has no children, is ready to stay until nine to impress the boss. Worse, babies smell, they throw up, they ruin the Swedish furniture you worked so hard to buy. A baby, let’s face it, is a bad career move.
So TV is it. People come home from work, sit down, and watch 50 or 60 channels worth of cable television all night long, sometimes nine or ten hours at a time. There are murder mysteries, documentaries about 19th-century prison escapes, old horror movies, game shows where people like you suddenly stop being losers and win millions of dollars, old Nazi newsreels, even pornography, if you search carefully... An infinitely varied other world which could not possibly be more different than the narrow, tiring, undignified high-pressure life you actually lead. It is a most indispensable distraction.
For many Americans, TV is already not enough. That’s why at least once a week, some American goes into his office and shoots forty or fifty people before killing himself, shouting things like, “I can’t take it anymore!” or “Was it worth it? Was it worth it?” These people have reached the breaking point. TV was not enough to distract them from the fact that they have no family, no friends, and lead spiritually empty lives in humiliating service of soulless corporations. Akaky Akakiyeich died when he lost his overcoat; Americans kill when they lose their patience.
No television in America... it would make the Ostankino disaster seem like a minor car accident in comparison. On the first day, people would stop going to work. On the second, they’d start carrying their rifles and guns around. People would riot on the streets. There would be rapes (well, maybe not rapes), thefts, arson, gang warfare, revolution. Suicide would be common; you might walk down the street and see people hurling themselves out the window, or hear everywhere the sounds of stools being kicked out from under soon-to-be-hanging bodies...
This would be the response of a humiliated and exhausted society that has been fed a steady diet of fake experience for the last thirty years or so.
Russians have had plenty of real life problems to worry about—they handle these things much better. In America, real life hasn’t been observed by scientists since sometime around 1947. Forced to face it, our people won’t handle it well. Unfortunately, we’ll never see it happen. You see, our firemen and safety engineers, particularly around our TV towers, they work long hours, too..
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