why i watch television.

an exercise in justification and denial

by rebecca eisenberg.

why is it always the people who know the least about something who complain about it the most?

take television.

i am getting sick and tired of of the "i am too smart for t.v." crowd.

often these people are highly educated upper-class folk who can afford to partake in real entertainment and thus are not stuck behind their boob tubes every night like the majority of us poor and vacation-impaired folk. they often have access to computers, fly on airplanes to places, own motorcycles, or subscribe to interesting periodicals like the utne reader. i run into them on their mountain bikes, or sipping lattes at coffee shops while reading tom robbins novels.

phoey on them. intellectual snobs.

and what do they know anyway? how can they go around complaining that television is bad? do they actually watch it to make that decision? or do they just take the utne reader's word for it: television is bad.

they tell me i have to justify my television watching. well, i think they have to justify why they do not watch television. they have no excuse not to.

especially if they claim they work "in multimedia." even more so if they spend a lot of their time playing computer games.

television is the food of most minds in the united states. want to know what people are absorbing, watch television. want to know what is in fashion, watch television. want to keep up on the latest hairstyles, watch television.

i actually like television. especially if i surf the web while watching it.

it is nice background material. better than a boyfriend, i say.

it says a lot of stupid things, but when you correct it, it does not argue back.

if you get to know it well, you can even put yourself on that side of the screen. i had a cable access tv show once. it was short-lived, but fun. people watched it.

people will watch anything, i guess.

the trick is, i think, not to ignore television, but to understand it, and embrace it. to get to know it well. to view it as competition.

because it is competition, if your goal is to change the world.

and changing the world is still my goal, for now.

television demonstrates, there is a lot that needs to be changed.


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