Florence King, cited by the American Thinker:
“Maybe it was the endless hours spent watching the Jacobins on MSNBC, maybe it was switching to CNN and finding cyberspacey John King, the high-tech finger-painter, noodling his living maps. Whatever it was, I was trapped in a cycle of revulsion, resignation, and exhaustion that became unbearable. It was cri de coeur time and out it came: ‘I HATE POLITICS!’
“I’m sick of everybody on both sides, whether it’s Obama making a fool of himself singing at the Apollo Theater, or the whole Nitt Gomney-Sanctus Santorum omnium gatherum on the right.”
My thoughts exactly. Also, a man I met Saturday at the local library voiced almost exactly the same feeling to me (after hearing me ask the librarian why they no longer carried The American Conservative).
While watching/listening to RNC, it made me think of the MLM and corporate sales rallies I have attended. Funny enough, on Dennis Miller today, John Fund made exactly the same comparison — “it’s like an Amway meeting.”
Really, the only reason to watch these circuses any more is to find out just how dangerous these clowns really are. But we already know that.
There are lots of other negatives to watching.
You can’t “just watch,” like you can’t “just watch” commercials, without being affected.
The slogans get into your brain.
There’s intense subliminal messaging, intended to make you identify with the process itself.
It attacks your brain physiology, your blood pressure, your brain feed-back loop, your adrenaline secretion, your breathing.
It is pure toxicity.
The very first step in becoming free of propaganda, is to turn off the TV and stop buying the major newspapers.
About the TV, you are absolutely right.
I should know, I read Jerry Mander’s book on why you should quit TV back when I was, like, 18. It feels like it’s even more addictive and mesmerizing and draining since it went digital. I feel like every time I watch, I’m losing a few IQ points. Especially the cable “news” channels. I have been watching more of those over the past year — that is easy to do when underemployed, and also convalescing.
My “legitimate” excuse has been that I “need” to watch the dueling networks (and the one in the “middle,” BBCNN) because I’m writing a book in which one major theme is the false left-right division.
But I think I’ve got enough research by now and it’s way past time to turn them off.
The RNC was kind of the long-in-coming tipping point that made me kind of sit up and slap myself. I already know I won’t be voting for either side. Why spend another second watching, or even listening to (usually, listening) this stupid, vapid, mind-numbing drek? And yeah, probably somewhere in those weird, cloudlike background images, they were projecting all kinds of subliminals. That time I spent listening to Clint Eastwood’s brain fart, or Ann Romney gush about her perfect kids and husband? I wish I could get that time back.
Local TV news, I have successfully avoided for years. I mentioned this to a local TV reporter I met a few years ago, and her knowing reply was: “When we’re not on, we’re not watching either.”
After the RNC circus, I kind of made a decision to restrict my TV diet to the C-SPAN channels, “The Soup,” and the occasional movie. I like Stossel, I’ll watch him sometimes.
Well, maybe a little “Swamp People”…