An Odd Practice

     ...puzzling over which fits my odd 5:30 AM mood. It started with these observations by my secret sweetie Adrienne:

     It is with continued amazement that today people spew their guts in emails, post terrible stuff on Facecrap, and make videos where they threaten bodily harm - often to an elected official. Now we have the added fun of watching people incriminate themselves on live streamed goofy Zoom meetings, like the mook in the following clip.

     The clip Adrienne mentions is embedded in this tweet. (I have no idea how to copy a clip from Twitter for embedding in a piece here.) And yes, you really have to wonder just how stupid some people can be, yet still be allowed to leave the house without a minder.

     But it’s everywhere! People take photos and make recordings of themselves doing things beyond my imagination – and I’ve got a rather vivid imagination. Hunter Biden’s now-famous videos of himself smoking crack, having sex, and so forth, are only one example. You may recall that a few years ago we had the “scandal” of Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photos getting into circulation. By my lights, the true scandal was how an actress that talented, wealthy, and widely admired could possibly be that stupid.

     (Digression: As many have asked, I will now answer: Yes. Jennifer Lawrence was, in an inverse way, the inspiration for Love in the Time of Cinema. I wanted to portray an actress with Lawrence’s assets of beauty and talent, but with good values and good sense. You may judge for yourselves whether I succeeded. Digression endeth here.)

     I blame it on television.

     These days, television is ubiquitous. People watch TV on their BLEEP!ing phones. They watch it while they’re driving, for the love of God. I know a fellow whose sister destroyed a brand new Corvette, given to her by her fiancé only a week before, doing exactly that. To millions upon millions of people, television is reality.

     Many of those people have only a vague sense of self. They’re not distinguished by any remarkable asset or talent. Many of them aren’t good for much of anything at all. When they look at their respective screens, they see people who’ve got other people watching them. Why, those folks on the screen are undeniably real. And the doofi (plural of doofus; study your Latin) watching them, in some foggy, formless, semiconscious way, are led to think that “If only I were on a screen being watched by someone, I would be real, too!”

     So they video themselves. Doing what? Whatever comes to mind. Preferably something they’ve seen actors do on television. And these days, actors do some scandalous things with the cameras running.

     The consequences, as Adrienne has noted, are conspicuously before us. They extend to politics: the sayings and doings both of politicians and of those of lesser station. Didn’t the odious Joe Biden brag on video about blackmailing the nation of Ukraine with federal money to get a prosecutor off Hunter’s case? Hasn’t everyone in America seen that video?

     (You might think it takes significant smarts to win a seat in the United States Senate. You’d be wrong. Biden is only one counterexample.)

     It’s television, Gentle Reader. Television is reality to uncounted millions of Americans. Unless and until they see themselves on a screen, they cannot sincerely believe in their own existences. You may rest assured that a lot of people go into politics because it’s the quickest way to get themselves on television...and that observation points to a fertile but as yet unharrowed field for future scholars of the madness of politics in this Year of Our Lord 2020. I wonder if it will survive to reach them.