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Do you see that picture of dead flies? They were killed by exposure to daytime television.
I came close to joining them today, stranded as I was in a doctor’s waiting room. But I got out just as my toenails and fingernails started to get brittle and fall off.
At least I was too early for any of the soap operas. Those, I think, are produced on other planets. Someday they’re going to give themselves away. For example, Brittony makes goo-goo eyes at Podsol, but suddenly changes the subject.
“Probably you have been wondering,” she says, “why I behave like a completely talent-less person who has never done any acting before, and also very near-sighted, trying to read cue cards with my lines on them–lines that sound as if they were written by not-very-bright teenagers who do a lot of drugs…” And then she turns into The Blob and engulfs poor Podsol before he can get away.
No soaps for me today. I had to make do with annoying shows devoted to the ecstatic worship of celebrities I never heard of. (Fame ain’t so famous anymore.) Then Rachel Ray. Then, horror of horrors, The View. Poe or Lovecraft never thought up anything half as awful as The View. It hadn’t been on for 30 seconds before the flies started falling off the windowpanes.
Again I ask, and yet again: if this is the stuff we pump into our minds every day, by way of popular culture, what long-term effects will it have on us? It has already given us Obama. Where will it end? Can a people nurtured on pure mindlessness even survive?
Take a last look at those flies, killed by The View.
You might be next.