Get Real! Stop the Inanity!

Posted on September 30, 2008

Hi! Let the blogging commence for Cowgirl Films….

Why blog? Why create a website? And why produce a documentary entitled Get Real! Wise Women Speak in the first place?

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of living in a country populated with sleepwalking citizens trapped in a silly excuse for reality, where a nasty and demanding child named pop culture holds the common discourse hostage.

The media may have birthed this child, but we are the ones who clothe, feed, and nurtureit at great cost to ourselves.

It’s high noon in the cultural war and vapid idiocy is winning.

This pathetic state of affairs hit me harder than usual the other day –

in the dentist chair of all places.

Turns out I had to be there for three-plus hours (don’t ask) and as I’m a pathetic coward when it comes to dental pain, my kindly dentist pacifies me with significant doses of nitrous oxide. (Listen, I’m not usually a coward; I’d choose labor pains over the dentist’s drill any day).

As I became increasingly stupefied by the nitrous oxide, a strange and horrifying understanding began to dawn with eerie clarity in my brain.

Strange juxtaposition, but a nitrous oxide high may just be the perfect state of consciousness for truly deciphering 24-hour cable news programming. And that is what I watched for the next three hours.

(At my dentist’s office, not only are you given a constant flow of nitrous oxide, they also let you hold the TV’s remote control so you can better distract yourself from the drilling in your mouth. Changing the station turns out to be problematic however, because you can’t see the remote control – your nitrous oxide mask and hose are in the way. So is the dentist’s large hand, which is holding the large drill. And due to the effect of the nitrous gas, you lack sufficient mind/body coordination to operate the remote with any degree of success, anyway.)

That’s why I was stuck watching cable news for the next three hours. Welcoming any distraction from the energetic drilling in my mouth, I focused heroically on the TV with every last smidgeon of my declining brainpower.

Horror!

My dental nightmare was engulfed by something worse — a terrible revelation. The news media has gone mad!

Completely insane. Total nut jobs. It would be funny except what does that make the rest of us – enabling nut jobs? And what is happening to our brain cells? I’m not sure, but it can’t be good.

In the course of more than three hours, I’m pretty certain that there were only three rotating stories on this cable network and here they are:

Story Number 1. Clay Aiken is …. GAY!

Oh boy, you think? This was a recurring leitmotif for the media that day, and boy, were those professional news people proud of it. They must have been because they trotted out this vital piece of information every few minutes. They’d given birth to fire, discovered fiber optics, saved all the starving children, created chocolate!

Story Number 2. The Blue Ghost

Apparently some kind of ghostly blue mass — dubbed the blue orb – has been making a recurring appearance in a health club. This is known because the orb trips a motion detector, setting off an alarm. I guess some orbs will do anything to get attention. There also seems to be a security camera capturing the orb’s high jinks on video, because if I’m not mistaken (and admittedly I could have been), there on the TV screen was the orb hovering cheekily above the treadmills. This delightful little anecdote practically owned the airwaves during my dental sojourn.

Story Number 3. The Financial Mess

Aha! Something substantial! My intrepid newscasters offered up a consideration of the current financial mess facing the country. The gist of their coverage was… people are squabbling! Everyone is squabbling – conservative Republicans squabble with Bush, who has somehow morphed into a socialist, McCain and Obama squabble with each other – to debate or not to debate, Nancy Pelosi squabbles with the titans of the complicated mortgage/ real-estate/ derivates /futures /shorts/amazingly incomprehensible investment schemes what have brought Wall Street to its knees, and the Democrats squabble with everybody.

Hmm, I may have been under the influence of nitrous, but I still feebly wondered if we might yet learn something from the news media, who are after all making their living on the public airwaves. Perhaps they’d chase down reasoned comment on a few subjects that I find of interest – things like personal and corporate responsibility, accountability and how we got in this mess in the first place.

Nope, back to the cuddly blue orb. Wait, back to gay Clay. He’s cuddly, too. After all, he’s a new daddy.

I admit I was fuzzy from the nitrous, but I was crystal clear on one thing – what I was watching on TV had absolutely nothing to do with anything remotely real, anything of actual substance or true meaning to our lives, our real lives.

TV land has gone insane. Stark raving mad. Utterly demented. Why should we care?

As a nation, we are facing a staggering financial crisis, the biggest any American under the age of 80 has ever seen, and newscasters – who are supposed to be journalists – present us with a pop singer’s coming out party and a cute ghost story.

Wouldn’t you agree, it’s time to Get Real?

To Be Continued…