It has been some time since my wife and I decided to have our aerials removed, the term that the late Malcolm Muggeridge used to explain that he and his wife had decided to remove television from their lives. Muggeridge, one of the first generation of TV stars and “talking heads”, had come to see that television was, at best, banal, and, at worst, a spewer forth of mendacious and poisonous propaganda.
Without doubt, the removal of television has enriched the lives of our family immensely, not merely by freeing us to do better and more edifying things in the evenings but also because it has silenced the incessant and insidious liar in our midst. Having a television is like inviting Wormtongue to become a member of one’s family! It is the resident secular fundamentalist.
I was reminded of the poisonous power of television a couple of nights ago after I returned to my hotel room in Indianapolis, having given a talk at a local Catholic parish. It was only 10pm when I returned to my room and I decided, against my better judgment, to see what was on TV. I channel-hopped for over an hour, sampling soundbites of inanity, skipping through all forty channels three times before my agitated mind could take no more. The most poisonous soundbite was delivered, not surprisingly, by CNN, a so-called news channel that has long since abandoned any pretence at objectivity. I listened as the reporter gave the “news” that Cardinal Timothy Dolan is tipped as a possible successor to Pope Benedict but that, just before leaving for Rome, he was being questioned “behind closed doors” about the “sex abuse scandal”. I’d heard enough and skipped to the next channel but the damage had been done. I was angered by the scarcely concealed hatred towards His Eminence that was emitted like aural poison from the secular fundamentalist liar that I had invited into the privacy of my room and my life. Why did I do it? Why did I invite Wormtongue into my room? I knew he was a liar and that he would do his best to disturb my peace of mind and damage my faith. Why did I do it? When will I ever learn?
Musing upon my TV experience on the flight home the next day, I realised the real danger of news addiction. So many of us spend too much of our time in the company of Wormtongue, allowing him to drip his poison into our ear, much as the wicked Claudius in Hamlet drips poison into the ear of the King and then drips the poison of his deceitful words into the ear of the young and gullible Laertes, poisoning the foolish youth’s heart against Hamlet.
Nowadays Wormtongue comes in many shapes and sizes, and wears many masks and guises. He whispers his lies from the news print on the page; he regurgitates falsehood from the corner of our room, his simpering smile filling ever larger screens; and now he sits comfortably on our lap, allowing us to hear his whispered venom almost anywhere and at any time.
We would all be much happier if we overcame our news addiction and banished Wormtongue from our lives. We do not need to know what Wormtongue tells us. We do not need his “news”. He’s a liar. Quite frankly, we don’t need to know most of what’s happening in any case, regardless of who it is who is conveying the news to us. Most news is a euphemism for gossip. We don’t need to know most of this stuff! Furthermore, we need to learn that it is foolish and dangerous to become anxious about things that we cannot control. We need to love the Lord our God and we need to love our neighbour (and our enemy). And that’s all!
If we want to change the world we have to become saints, or at least become more like saints than we have been in the past. Sanctity and sanity are synonymous. We need to change the world by one act of love at a time. This is easier said than done but it is much harder to do if we insist on listening to Wormtongue. His lies will weaken us, poisoning us slowly, until we are no longer able to live good and holy lives.
We need to overcome our news addiction so that we can be a better light in the darkness of the times in which we live. Holiness is the enemy of the Dark. Let’s work at getting ourselves and our neighbours to Heaven and tell Wormtongue to go to Hell!
Hear, hear! I haven’t watched TV for many years. We watch DVDs but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find good enough ones.
The best bet is to seek out and download good movies from the internet. We have a whole slew – Poirot and Marple, classics like 12 Angry Men, The Third Man, Diary of a Country Priest, etc. etc. There’s plenty of good raw material out there if one knows where to look.
An excellent reflection and to use up the time you’ve gained I would heartily recomment (to you and the readers) an excellent book published in 1985. Its author is Neil Postman and the title is “Amusing ourselves to Death”. Paglia’s acclaim for it is prescient when she notes, ” [Postman] foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip and greed.”
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“Let’s work at getting ourselves and our neighbours to Heaven and tell Wormtongue to go to Hell!”
Ha! Good advice told in a humorous way. I like it! 🙂
I admire your decision. I see this more and more with the more traditionally minded, I think it’s a wise choice.
As for myself, I still have and probably always will have a TV….mostly for video games and movies. Even though I grew up in a family that was big on TV, I myself am not. Most of what’s on is either boring, junk, or both. Today it’s only worse. So I’m very selective with TV, as I am with my movies and games. These days you don’t really have a choice. I mean sheesh, just in my young lifetime alone video games have become that much more toxic and depraved that I find myself scanning their content ratings indepth, as if I was a parent looking out for their child. It’s amazing just how much uglier they have become in just a decade.
However when I have children the TV is going off, and rarely ever going on. I want to raise them right, and there is just too much wrongness on the aptly named boobtube. And like you said, there is so much else we could be doing, I think it will be very beneficial.
The same goes for the news. I used to watch it religiously, and I was all the worse for it. It was like inviting despair into your home. It can be like a vampiric entity, draining away your life even as it hypnotizes you to stay right there with it.
Some news isn’t bad of course, but all too much of it comes from Wormtongue. And besides the whole 24 hour news channel thing, that’s absurd to the umpteenth level. Even hard news is rendered to little more than idle gossip in that format.
Bravo! I’m very partial to a bumper sticker that I’ve occasionally seen on the cars of insightful souls urging us to “Kill your television.” 🙂 News is typically just gossip repackaged.
Marina Tsvetaeva wrote the following poem about the subject under discussion.
For News — read Lies
For News — read Trash
Each line — a Libel
Each word — a lash…