Television – Maverick Philosopher

The Obsolete Man

The Twilight Zone marathon is in progress at the SyFy channel. One of the best episodes of the series which ran from 1959-1964 is The Obsolete Man (1961). Rod Serling's opening narration is eerily prescient and eerily relevant to our present police-state predicament:

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.

"Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace."

An accurate summation of the Biden regime. The most recent example of illogic: the defense of democracy requires the destruction of democracy by banning the popular front-runner from the ballot on trumped-up charges when, as is obvious, the physically decrepit, mentally incompetent, morally corrupt, and political destructive Biden is the one who ought to be banned from the ballot if anyone is to be banned, not that I am saying that any one of the current contenders should be banned from the ballot. For Biden is a traitor in plain dereliction of duty. If the Republicans were not lousy with feckless RINOs, Traitor Joe and his noxious entourage would no longer be befouling the White House. The Republicans' inability, or rather unwillingness, to give as good as they get is exasperating. Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but instead of learning from him and engaging the enemy, too many of them waste their time and energy attacking the only man who can turn things around. The well-fed Christie, flaccid in body and mind, is a USDA prime example.

As for the assault on truth, the main players in the Biden administration are proven serial brazen liars: Biden, Mayorkas, et al. Liars, plagiarists, Orwellian language-abusers: scumbags all. Is there even one member of that 'team' who does not exhibit one or more of the modes of mendacity? Got an example? Let me hear it.

Serling via the Meredith character puts librarians in a good light. Rod in 1961 was no doubt thinking of Nazi book burnings. A mere 16 years had passed since the collapse of the Third Reich. But times have changed. Librarians are now too often anti-biblic in their banning of books and anti-civilizational in their promotion of pornography and other species of cultural garbage. Librarians now are mostly leftist termites. We have our work cut out for us.

Jeopardy! The TV Show

Starring Alex Trebek!

One observes very bright people displaying their cleverness and mental agility via recall of isolated facts. Meanwhile the horrors of life continue unabated. Now surely there is nothing wrong with some escapist entertainment. Right? The other night the trivia questions were about the First World War. And the clever contestants had all the answers. But as Jack Kerouac asked:

How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?

2016 Twilight Zone New Year’s Marathon

Could there be a better way to end such a surreal year?

It starts tomorrow, New Year's Eve, at 6 AM and runs for three and one half days on the SyFy channel. Here is the schedule. Two I won't miss tomorrow morning:

9 am: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine
9:30am: Escape Clause

Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed. Me, I've seen 'em all, multiple times each. The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. Back in aught-nine I offered my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.

The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four-pack-a-day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary or Obama Yomama or any latter-day leftard to decide.

On Seinfeld

I confess to being a fan of this TV series many of whose episodes are now over 20 years old. I have seen every episode numerous times. I am not a student of the series as I am a student of the great Twilight Zone series, but then numerous episodes of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, belonging as it does to the Golden Age of television, really are worthy of study.

What do I like about Seinfeld? Perhaps it is the utterly zany quality of the Jewish humor. Here is some of it in Yiddish (with subtitles).

And the political incorrectness I like. But things have changed in America, so much so that Jerry Seinfeld nowadays refuses to perform before college audiences.

Indeed, it must be jarring for a boomer like Seinfeld, who went to college in the early 70s, when students were debating real issues freely, to confront today’s college campuses, where students often invent issues about which to be aggrieved, many times on behalf of other parties, and then have to find "free speech zones" in which to discuss them.

Consider the uproar over a statue of a man talking to a woman at a Texas college, which some decided was a depiction of "mansplaining," or a man patronizingly explaining something to a woman. Paul Tadlock, the 79-year-old sculptor, said the piece — done for 20 years before its offense was "discovered" — merely depicted his daughter, a student at the time, talking to a friend.

Then there were the students at UC-Berkeley, who called for "an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities," which sounds serious. Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret felt aggrieved that a classical philosophy course had the audacity to cover actual thought leaders from classical philosophy, including Plato and Aristotle — because they all happened to be white men.

And earlier this year a male student at Portland, Oregon’s Reed College was removed from the discussion portion of his freshman humanities class for questioning the statistics on college sexual assaults and challenging whether or not there is such a thing as a "rape culture."

Why on earth would a comedian like Seinfeld, whose career has focused on humorously pointing out absurdities bring his act to such an utterly humorless and incorrigibly politically correct setting?

By the way, ever notice the similarity between these two guys?

Twilight Time Again

The semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon starts New Year's Eve morning and runs for two days on the SyFy Channel.

My eyes glued to the set, my wife invariably asks, "Haven't you seen that episode before?" She doesn't get it. I've seen 'em all numerous times each. Hell, I've been watching 'em since 1959 when the series first aired. But the best are inexhaustibly rich in content, delightful in execution, studded with young actors and actresses who went on to become famous alongside the now forgotten actors of yesteryear, with their period costumes and lingo, making allusions to the politics of the day. Timeless and yet a nostalgia trip. A fine way to end one year and begin another.

Too hip to moralize, Rod Serling was nevertheless a moralist whose 30-minute morality tales, the best of them anyway, set a standard unsurpassed to this day.

To see how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of one of these episodes, see here.

Semi-Annual Twilight Zone Marathon Starts Tomorrow!

Schedule here.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.

It is appropriate that on Independence Day one should celebrate with Serling, WWII paratrooper, anti-statist, defender of the individual.

Serling knew how to entertain while also stimulating thought and teaching moral lessons. Our contemporary dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

Our Garbage Culture

Last night, the first episode of Fargo, the TV series, which is loosely based on the 1996 Coen Brothers movie of the same name. Another cause and effect of the decline of a culture unravelling with each passing day?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht #585 (Kroener Ausgabe):

Ein Nihilist ist der Mensch, welcher von der Welt, wie sie ist, urteilt, sie sollte nicht sein, und von der Welt, wie sie sein sollte, urteilt, sie existiert nicht.

A nihilist is one who judges of the world as it is, that it ought not be, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist.

Pessimism and Anti-Natalism in True Detective

True Detective is a new HBO series getting rave reviews. This bit, I am told by Karl White from whom I first learned about the series, is from the first episode. It's good. I'll leave it to you to sort through the sophistry of Rust's spiel.

Here is some TD dialog about religion. I'll say this about it: it is well done and stimulates thought.

The scriptwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, is a very interesting cat who abandoned a tenure-track university gig to try his hand at writing for TV. It takes balls to give up security for a long shot. Especially when you have a kid. At that point nothing-ventured-nothing-gained risk-taking begins to taper off into irresponsibility. If I had had young children I wouldn't have quit my tenured post. Conservatives are cautious and responsible, fiscally and otherwise.

Pizzolatto earns a place in my Mavericks category. Bio and interview here. Excerpt:

Do you think part of the reason why television had so much appeal for you was that you knew you’d be able to reach an audience? Everyone has a TV in the living room. Not everyone reads literary novels.

That’s a great point. I think, with myself, growing up in rural Louisiana but having TV—TV jumps all these class boundaries. For a kid to even have a disposition to be willing to sit down and read literary fiction and not regard it as a waste of time—that requires a certain amount of cultural influence and education. But TV sneaks in, no matter what. I really like that. And the idea that you could put your heart and soul and every bit of yourself into it, the same way you could a novel, and stay there and make sure it was done right? That was all appealing.

That reminds me of my old entry, Books and Reality and Books, which begins:

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

Jack Klugman and The Twilight Zone

I almost entitled this post, "Jack Klugman Enters the Twilight Zone," except that this is the vale of twilight. Be that as it may, Jack Klugman, who died yesterday, starred in four Twilight Zone episodes. The news accounts mention that fact but don't say which. "A Passage for Trumpet," "In Praise of Pip," "A Game of Pool," and "Death Ship." Twilight Zone marathon coming up on New Year's Eve. Check it out to see what TV can be.

A Hitchcock-Serling Coincidence

I've been watching old Alfred Hitchcock re-runs from '63 and '64. I must have seen some of these as a kid, but I've forgotten them all. On the night of 10 August I saw "The Magic Shop." What struck me was how similar in theme this is to the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life."

The very next morning I checked to see if a Twilight Zone episode was airing on the Sci Fi channel. There was, and it happened to be "It's a Good Life." So that is the coincidence, and you can make of it what you will.

Hitchcock is good, but he can't hold a candle to Serling. Rod Serling's 1959-1964 series was and is TV at its very best. The best of the episodes are inexhaustibly rich especially 50 years later. They provide an insight into the speech patterns, the mores, the sartorial habits, the politics, and the cinematography of the day. More importantly, many of them are morality tales that convey important moral truths and life lessons. Serling was above all a moral teacher. We have nothing like this on TV today. What we have are endless quantities of degrading garbage.

Two Hundred Channels of Dreck

It's not all dreck of course: there is the Hitler History Channel, the Hitler Military Channel, C-Span (especially its Book Notes), and a few others.

An example of outstanding TV is Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959-1964. Comparing a series like TZ with trash like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and recent 'reality' shows, one sees the extent of the decline.

Companion post: Some Things I Look for in a Movie

Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist

When I lived with my parents, I watched a television, theirs. But when I got out on my own, I owned no TV, first for reasons of poverty, and later, after nailing down a philosophy teaching gig, for reasons of inertia and elitism. The life of the mind is a magnificent thing, but it can breed a certain arrogance: one fancies oneself vastly superior to the ordinary boob who doesn't read books, can't write or think beyond the utilitarian, and sucks on the glass tit for the little cognitive pablum his impoverished pate can absorb. It's not called the boob tube for nothing. You will have noticed the dual sense of 'boob.'

My period of tubelessness included the whole of the 1970s and roughly the first third of the 1980s. Once I got the teaching job, I was able to afford a stereo system. (I still have the tuner, a Pioneer SX-880. The Technics turntable doesn't see much use, though, despite my holding on to all my albums from the '60s and beyond.) I gave myself a classical music education and listened to the FM band. My tuner was usually set to WYSO, Yellow Springs, Ohio, an ultraliberal enclave and home to Antioch College. WYSO was an NPR affiliate and that is where I got most of my news and commentary. That and The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, to both of which I subscribed. In those days I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to the AM band. As you can see, I was a bit of a liberal. But experience and hard thinking have a way of making conservatives out of liberals.

But then a lovely creature entered my life. She came without a dowry but with a TV. Thus the tube entered my life and I joined the booboisie, to extend a neologism introduced by H. L. Mencken. But it was now the mid-80s and cable was the thing. Brian Lamb and the cable providers made possible C-Span, and this brings me to my main point.

No TV, no C-Span. Therein lies the main reason for owning a TV.

There are several other reasons, of course, but that is the main one. I suppose I am still an elitist, but an elitist of a different sort. Before, my elitism was manifested by a rejection of TV tout court; now by a selection of perhaps 20 out of 200 channels as worth viewing. The Hitler Channel, more commonly know as the History Channel, is worth a visit. I recently discovered the Documentary Channel which, despite its leftist leanings, is a source of some outstanding documentaries. I'm not talking about docu-drama bullshit, such as one might find on MSM networks, but hard-core documentaries containing lengthy interviews with interesting characters.

And then there are those Twilight Zone marathons, on New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July. It is a good time to be alive.

Liberal Dreckmeisters and Their Decadent Drivel

How is that for a polemical title?

The first decades of televison were comparatively wholesome compared to what came later. An example of outstanding TV was Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959-1964. Comparing a series like TZ with trash like The Sopranos, one sees the extent of the decline.