Maureen Dowd and the Ghost of Christmas Laziness

Everyone's mailing it in this time of year. We've spent so much time wandering around malls and chain bookstores with attached coffee shops wishing that we'd written one of those goddamn songs that gets played approximately 40,000 times a day between Halloween and Christmas so that we could have personal shoppers worry about what the perfect gift for this or that person is and so that we wouldn't go totally broke trying to impress our loved ones. The days are colder and darker and somehow the end of the year, however arbitrarily placed, gets us depressed about our general lack of economic or social mobility over the past twelve months. So we get lazy. Dishes are left in the sink longer, inadequate gifts purchased, plasticky gift basket food replaces dinner and we blow off as much of our jobs as we possibly can.
This makes it the perfect time of the year for New York Times Op Ed columnists. They can write their usual recycling the same crap over and over again drivel and their readers will just assume that holiday stress is the cause. Now, I feel for Op Ed columnists. It can't be easy to have to write two short pieces a week on a six figure salary. It must be difficult to live up to the assumption that if one gets paid to write what one thinks, then one must have interesting thoughts. But, sometimes, their laziness is almost shocking. No, I'm not talking about the fact that Kristof recently brought up those two sex workers who he "rescued" so long ago, and no I'm not talking about whatever mindless, repeating the same baseless mantra over and over again crap that Friedman is always trying to shove down our throats. Frankly, anything other than shameless self-promotion and constant over-simplification would be shocking at this point from either of them. But, Maureen Dowd (from whom we certainly expect very little) actually devoted today's entire column to telling us what Donald Trump thinks about everyone else. Forget, for the moment, the fact that we can find out what Donald Trump thinks on just about every cable news show and celebrity gossip column. She, essentially, passed her job onto him for the day. Sure, she actually typed it up and threw in some of her tired, tired snark for good measure, but she left the Opinion part of Op Ed to him. Couldn't she spend her column trying to decide what nickname she should give to Robert Gates? (My money's on Gatesy or maybe Rummy 2) Granted it's Christmas, but Maureen Dowd probably has a personal shopper. She didn't, as far as I know, write any timeless Christmas classic, but she doesn't seem to have any trouble singing the same tired tune.

Always on top

We all want the same things: a slightly bigger apartment, a nicer couch, financial security, a flat screen, fame, fortune and a constantly diverted mind. The pursuit of this last one can prove tricky this time of year. It seems odd. We should all be out buying Nintendo Wiis and predistressed jeans and crock pots for all our dearest loved ones. Or we should be helping orphans and old curmudgeons discover the true meaning of Christmas. Or we should be berating that kid working for minimum wage at the mall for wishing us Happy Holidays. Regardless of which path we choose, we should be roaming about this Winter Wonderland stressed out to the point of losing it with Here Comes Santa Claus stuck in our heads.
This is why finding diversion can be so difficult. Everyone is out with things to do, so all of the good TV shows like their cousins the Grizzly Bears go into hibernation until january. This leaves us fixing in very strange places. On Mondays, we should be waiting for 9 o clock to roll around to find out what's going to happen to the Heroes. Instead, we're TV DVD fixing, trying to cram all of Season 1 of Veronica Mars into less than a week. But, after three episodes, we begin to need a break frrom mysteries wrapped in mysteries wrapped into plucky blondes. So we tune into the Comcast and we flip and we find...nothing. We flip to all of our regular channels. Still nothing. Finally we end up somehow watching Mary, Mother of Jesus on TBN (they don't run commercials, they just get their money from the poor souls who actually believe that if they send $20 into the station, then Jesus will send them $40). The first thing that makes us stop is the very low production value. The second is that Jesus is Christian Bale. Low production value and Christian Bale just before he blew up again. I had to watch. Of course I did, there was nothing else on. So I watch til the end and after Mary has urged us to continue on with Christ's teachings, the credits roll and the movie is Executive Produced by Robert Shriver and his mommy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Just then it hits me. Some people already have what we all want. Their apartments can't get any bigger, their couches no nicer. They're set for life and they have tons of flat screens. These people don't sit around and daydream how to get or what it would be like to have all that shit, they are sitting around concocting schemes to keep it. They will fight us tooth and nail to keep the world running just the way it is so they won't be swept out of the oligarchy. That is why the Crouches (they who derive their wealth and power from the fear of the gays, the feminists and the secularists) are teaming up with the Kennedys (they who derive their power from those who fear those backwoods, theocratic zealots). Neither is really fighting this little cultural war that they've staged for our diversion. They are fighting together to maintain everything as it is. The Kennedys already placed a few chips on Schwarzenegger: why not the religious right? It's all about maintaining. They scratch each other's backs and trump up fights over social issues so none of us will ever think that maybe if we just took their big apartments and flat screens and couches, then ours would be bigger. Instead, they make us feasr each other and turn to them for protection. That's why they're alwways on top. But they could be a little more generous with their power; they could bring Heroes off of hiatus.

In which I explain the difference between real people and TV people

Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, or however it is the famous quote goes. We work jobs that we hate with every cubic inch of our bodies and we come home at the end of the day wishing that we didn't have to return the next. Of course, we have rent and electricity and car insurance and student loans and our cable bill to pay and we have booze and food and drugs and diverting little electronics to buy. If we don't return ourselves to that dimly lit, blood pressure raising, completely unfullfilling dead end pit of despair, then we can't have all the things we want and need. If we don't surrender ourselves to the machine, we have to be that guy who wanders around my neighborhood approaching everyone with "I don't want no money or nothing..." or, even worse, we move back in with our parents. So, we cling to these pathetic jobs with all the might in our weak little hands and we hand over a piece of our spirit and our will to live each and every day (except Saturday and Sunday: then we go grocery shopping and do lauindry). We don't sleep or hold normal conversations for a week because we are convinced that we will be cut loose from our jobs for which we feel over-qualified for sending errant faxes which Derrida and Lacan would have a field day discussing if I only remembered that much of college.

The people on TV are different. They have jobs that they would go to even if they hit the Powerball tomorrow. You couldn't keep those doctors on Grey's Anatomy out of the hospital with a National Guard unit. They work all the time and they actually love it. They skip out on holidays and weekends and all of those things for which we, the quiet and the desperate, live. This, I think, is the main appeal of the show. Sure, it's about pretty people with "problems" just like ours. Except, I can't remember the last time I fucked a coworker in the break room or accidentally killed someone at work. Sure, it's escapist because of all the soap opera crap and it's escapist because they're doctors and they're dreamy, but mostly, for me at least, it's escapist because it's about people who love their jobs Yes, it's also grief porn and charm porn but the most unbelievable part for me is that it's career satisfaction porn.

Even on "reality" porn, like The Wire there are people who are passionate about their work. They really want to improve the police department or the schools or whatever. Of course, on that particular show, their passion is there just to be smashed against the mean streets until it is bloody and unrecognizable. But, passion is there. The feds on Without a Trace and the cops on Law and Order give their lives meaning by doing their jobs. Even on Studio 60, people think they are part of something important (which should give the show a nice burst of tragicomedy. It, of course, is lost way too deep up its own ass to realize this).

On TV, everyone has something meaningful in their lives. In reality, we are lucky if we can find something meaningful to watch after work. We are left to live their lives vicariously while ours slip away from us.

We're all just trying to get by without hating ourselves too much. We leave the satisfying lives of passion to the pretty people on TV. It is why escapism will never die: There's too much reality out there.

Good Old Fashioned Mind-Numbing Mass Cultural Radiation Poisoning

Friday 12/1/06
Grey's Anatomy Season 2 DVD approximately 2 hours
Total Viewing Time: 2 hours

Saturday 12/2/06
Grey's Anatomy Season 2 DVD 10:42 PM to 12:15 AM
Grey's Anatomy Season 2 DVD 12:44 AM to 1:30 AM
Total Viewing Time 2 hours 19 minutes

It may be true that going out of one's way to watch something in the hope that it will somehow enlighten or broaden or even fulfill some particular emotional need can qualify an act of watching the screen as something other than passively receiving the rays of big media in order to satisfy an addiction. But, I have to be honest with myself. The DVDs just showed up in my apartment. My crazy girlfriend (who prefers to be known in these messages only as such) wanted to watch them and put them on. I slavishly responded to the sound of the machine and sat on the couch and watched hours of episodes (which for the most part I had seen) of a show that I think is really catchy but not certainly not amazing. I thought about reading a book or something, but when I hear TV, my brain focuses in on it. No matter how hard I try to focus on that great novel or even try to sleep, I can only follow the plot of whatver is being broadcast in the next room. So, my time with the sexy doctor's and their breezy grief porn is not above or even different than regular old TV watching. As much as I'd like ti kid myself, my time on the couch crying hysterically at the death of some train crash victim was nothing more than good old fashioned mind-numbing mass cultural radiation poisoning.

A question about the rules

I didn't post my viewing log yesterday. It's not that I had another heroic day of no TV. I did expose myself to that sweet radiation. But it was on DVD. I was convinced by sources unnamed that I shouldn't count DVD watching which may or may not be true to the experiment. But, I feel like I cheated. After all, the DVD was disc one of the second season of Grey's Anatomy. I didn't choose to put it on, but once something is playing on the box in my little apartment, I am helpless to do anything but watch. So, if anyone has any feedback as to whether this should count towards my weekly TV log, let me know cause I'm conflicted.
BTW, Grey's Anatomy isn't one of those shows that benefits from being watched on DVD. In fact, it just seems like a very strange flow. One minute, two characters will be discussing something scandalous, then suddenly it will go black, a swooping helicopter shot of Seattle is shown and then bam! the same two characters are discussing the same issue in a different room.