{"id":10705,"date":"2011-05-12T10:57:24","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T10:57:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/12\/confessions-of-a-former-anti-tv-elitist\/"},"modified":"2011-05-12T10:57:24","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T10:57:24","slug":"confessions-of-a-former-anti-tv-elitist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/12\/confessions-of-a-former-anti-tv-elitist\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 <\/span>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.'<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>.  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<\/em> and The New<\/em> Republic<\/em>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

No TV, no C-Span. Therein lies the main reason for owning a TV.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em>; now <\/span>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. <\/span><\/p>\n

And then there are those Twilight Zone<\/em> marathons, on New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July.  It is a good time to be alive.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,432],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}