“Their land is filled with silver and gold and there is no end to their treasures….Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made.” Isaiah 2: 7-8
I have a love-hate relationship with television. For most of my adult life I shunned TV. It started back in the early 1990’s when a network cancelled the show “Thirty something”. It was my favorite show, had a solid viewer base, and was critically respected. It was cancelled because the network got greedy and wanted to make more advertising dollars. I stopped watching television. Don’t get me wrong. I’d still watch the news, or the weather, or a football or baseball game, or home remodeling programs on the Do-it- Yourself network. But when I was asked, “Did you see—-(insert any popular TV show—) last night? My answer was always no.
When I was imprisoned in the county jail, there was a TV on the block for all of the inmates to watch. The day was filled with reruns of Supernatural, NCIS, Bones, Castle, Family Guy, Pawn Stars, Fast and Loud, American Pickers, Friends, Seinfeld, How I met your Mother, Law and Order, CSI, Big Bang Theory, and movies that were so chopped up for content and commercials that they hardly made sense. So I played cards, usually with my back to the TV.
It wasn’t until I got to my current state facility that I was able to get a TV in my cell. They don’t “give” inmates TV in prison. You have to buy the TV. It was $260 for a 19” RCA LED TV with nearly all functions disabled, including the clock and sleep timer functions. Cable is currently $16.50 per month for a standard “basic” cable channel lineup. There are no premium or expanded-basic channels available for any price. When I first got the TV, my cellie was B—–. He did not have a TV, so I let him watch my TV in exchange for a bag of coffee each month. He understood that when I wanted to watch a show, it was my TV. At other times, I told him he could watch whatever he wanted. That didn’t work out so well, and after a couple of weeks I had to set down some rules. Rule one – no shows that had anything to do with jail. That included reality shows based on jail or prison, as well as shows like “Dog the Bounty Hunter.” Rule two – an entire day’s worth of “Storage Wars” or “Ghost Adventurers” was too much to handle. One or two- episodes per day was enough. Rule three- movies starring Will Farrell were limited to one per day. And the same Will Ferrell movie could not be watched twice in the same week. Even with this rule, I can probably recite all the lines of “Taladega Nights.” Rule four – the TV goes off at 11pm. There’s no staying up all night watching shows that weren’t worth watching in the daytime.
And because it was my TV, B—-got to watch a lot of PBS—-Nova, Nature, the PBS News Hour, Great Performances, and Frontline. He got to watch old movies like the Marx Brothers in “A Day at the Races” and Judy Garland in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” He thought they were pretty good. He also got to watch a lot of Christian music videos on JVCE-TV, and the occasional congressional panel discussion on CSpan.
One of the things I had not missed about watching TV is all of the commercials. It was hard enough in the outside world watching all the food and restaurant commercials that make you hungry at nine o’clock at night. In here it’s just torture. The things they can do with hot melted cheese on a pizza is almost scandalous.
The more I watched TV commercials, though, the more I saw a scary development. Take these commercials as examples. The song “Afternoon Delight” (which appears in the Will Farrell movie “Anchorman”) used to promote Taco Bell. “We’re Only Human” promoting accident forgiveness from Liberty Mutual. The Beach Boy’s “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” for AT&T Business Communications. And “Take My Breath Away” (the love theme from the movie “Top Gun”) for Fiber One bars. Songs about relationships between human beings now being co-opted to market things. Gone are the days when products had their own jingles for advertisements—“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” and “Give me a break of that Kit Kat bar.” Now we have one of my favorite songs, “This is the First Day of My Life,” a song about the love between a man and a woman being like a new beginning in one’s existence, marketing a real estate site like Zillow.com where you buy a thing – a house. A house is an important thing, but it is not anywhere close to human relationships. And in our modern confusion we begin to undervalue the love between two people,, and overvalue the love between people and things, so that most people don’t even notice the distorted use of these songs of love (except for people like me who have too much time to overthink everything.)
In Isaiah, God is angry with the people because they are bowing down to the work of their own hands. Things are taking the place of relationships, especially the relationship between the created and the Creator. I’m not saying you’re doing that and I’m not saying I’m doing that. But as I look at the glowing rectangle that is positioned for easy viewing from my bunk bed, and I see images of things and stuff and services day after day, I am aware that “we” are doing it. And it’s at least something to think about, to be aware of.