O P I N I O N

TIMELY WRITER

By John Angelo

Our friends Deb and Joe generously invited us over to watch this year’s Super Bowl and its commercials.

Again.

Lorrie and I have been without a television going on 15 years. Aside from events such as the aforementioned annual religious event of American football, there is precious little that we are tempted to watch in real time.

The Olympics?  It’s a bunch of athletes skirting the amateur/professional line with constant announcements and flow charts of the amount of medals the U.S. has tallied. This has nothing to do with the games’ original intent of amateurs representing their countries in a spirit of international friendship.

Give me amateurs like Britain’s Eddie the Eagle, the far-sighted and self-funded ski jumper who finished last in both the Normal Hill and the Long Hill in the 1988 winter Olympics at Calgary. He jumped 61 meters in the Normal Hill. The second-to-last finisher jumped 140.4 meters.

The World Series? They now play almost exclusively night games and I can’t stay up late to watch a batter in a ski mask (see Eddie the Eagle) and long underwear while the opposing infielders literally chatter “Hum Batter Batter” in the November cold.

Normal football on Monday, Thursday and Sunday nights as well as Thanksgiving and an occasional Saturday night? I like my marriage. My all-time favorite Playboy cartoon depicted a rabid football fan potatoed in front of his TV set yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” Unbeknownst to him, his wife is exiting the front door with her bags packed. Comedian Jim Gaffigan talked on CBS Sunday Morning, available online after the show has aired, about the troubling football withdrawal symptoms he annually experiences the Sunday, Monday and Thursday in the week after the Super Bowl.

My New York Jets? A ten-minute synopsis on YouTube two hours after another colossal defeat is pain enough. J-E-TS. Just End The Suffering. (See Kafka #1 or Kafka #2 below). I have an entire choir in my head begging me to take seriously The Who’s “won’t get fooled again.”

The Kentucky Derby? I’m hacking into FanDuel and DraftKings this May with the intent of prying into their pari-mutuelly speaking space-time continuum, thus allowing me to bet after the race has been run. May these professional bookies confuse the Beach Volleyball and British Darts results with the Run for the Roses trifecta. When I did an article several years ago on the then new DraftKings Seabrook betting emporium, I had to refer to what transpired there as “gaming.” Now DraftKings and FanDuel are gambling partners with MLB and the NFL. “Gaming” is now for Wheel of Fortune.

Presidential candidate debates? Elon Musk. I don’t like him.

The Academy Awards? The 2023 Best Picture Oscar went to Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film forever lost on the space-time continuum (See Kentucky Derby above). I thought the film was over after the talking rocks and the Dunkin’ Donut cult were revealed. No such luck.

TV commercials? Franz Kafka said it best in The Trial as the protagonist  K. is held for days, weeks, months with no formal charges against him in a building he can’t exit: “…he was roused by a shout from the warders, who were sitting at the small table by the open window and, as K. now realized, were devouring his breakfast.”

Just when you think you’ve got something, you’ve got nothing at all. Commercials only put a conspicuous consumption curse on your Lucky Charms. Money for nothing.

Economic ecologist and essayist Wendell Berry writes: “The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.”

The late New York University Professor Neil Postman is the author of the 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. He compares the 3,000 ads we unwittingly ingest each day to soma, the plentiful drug in Brave New World that keeps the masses in a perpetually complacent and pacified state.

“Form excludes the content,” Postman says. “A particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas.” Sure, television has given us PBS and Mr. Rodgers, but Love Boat, The Apprentice and Survivor: The Bronx, are closer to what we desire. Is it any wonder that most Americans confuse editorials with hard news? Please don’t pass me the said-to-be-injectable bleach.

Postman presciently predicted the loss of essential live person-to-person relationships that social media and cellphones now cost us, though his critics point out that he was also against cruise control.

Years ago I came across Annie Dillard’s (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) rules for writers. #1 was “Forget about television.”

At 71 years old I have reached the pinnacle of being a famous unknown freelance writer without a television. Where’s the celebratory soma?

Postman again: {television commercials} “…are a mythology if you will of handsome people being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune of possessing advertised goods and services.”

Car ads are a perfect example. A Ford Tundra navigates the TV wilds of Alaska or New Jersey with nary another vehicle on a manly-man road to slow things down. The idiot box ads often end with a truck or car perched on a cliff overlooking the Grand Canyon or Puget Sound in a tribute to Manifold Destiny. The reality never viewed in an ad is bumper-to-bumper traffic exiting Manchester to points north on a Friday afternoon, all part of a slow-moving caravan looking for a designated fix of nature in the White Mountains. Which way to the tundra?

Lorrie and I are hardly Luddites. I’m typing this on Microsoft Word 2010 and we subscribe to both PBS and Netflix, which we view online. The goal is not sensory deprivation as the only way to be 100 percent ecologically correct is to be dead. The goal is to be mindful, to only allow into your body and soul that which uplifts. Uncle Walt Whitman wrote, “That you are here, that life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse – And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

Ernest Hebert’s 1979 novel The Dogs of March, set in fictitious Darby, New Hampshire, is a gritty and unsurpassed tale of New Hampshire’s rural and deep underclass, the “shanty people.” I saw the prominence of television sets during my time volunteering in Appalachia. The only verboten show was The Beverly Hillbillies. The neon god appliance offers hope and escape for the often hopeless in perceived inescapable circumstances. Hebert writes: “The Harris children were dispatched to the playroom, a bombed-out area of drool, dried vomit, urine, smashed toys, crayon drawings on the walls, bitten furniture, and its own television set, the only object in the room that was undamaged and working the way it was supposed to.”

As for Kafka #2, Mike Kafka was a backup NFL quarterback throughout his career. Because of his name, his QB rating went up, not down, every time he threw an interception or got sacked. Completions and touchdowns thrown worked against him. He’s now 37 years old and retired. Naturally, the Jets are interested in signing him but they first have to find him on the practice field with Kafka #1 in Prague’s cheerless and endless hall of justice.

Joe and Deb have assured me that the New York Jets will be in the 2026 Super Bowl…with no commercials.

You can reach John Angelo at timelywriter@hotmail.com