Sick? Click!

By TAD BARTIMUS

It's flu season. The common cold, bronchitis, walking pneumonia, sinusitis, whatever it is, has got us in its grip. Doctors whose waiting rooms are overflowing count on this season to pay their children's college tuition; patients begging for an appointment will happily fork over whatever it takes to get some relief-so-they-can-rest medicine.

When I got mine, I took to my bed with a giant-size box of tissues, all of my unread Christmas books, a pile of unanswered letters and my clicker. This last item was a mistake.

Remember when we didn't mind getting sick because we had I Love Lucy and M*A*S*H and Bewitched reruns to get us through it? You could put your aching head on auto-pilot, snuggle down in the covers and give yourself up to poodle skirts and The Fonz, a buxom blonde in harem pants who lived in a bottle and, if you were lucky, an old Elvis movie in garish color.

Aiming the POWER switch at The Box, I was looking forward to a quiet day of misery. Click! I tuned smack into a talk show brawl. A burly teen-age boy in baggy pants and six layers of shirts was confessing to his dropout girlfriend who was twisting her hair that he'd had intimate relations with her best friend. She lunged at him, he lunged back. The talk show's bouncers moved in and the audience whooped its approval. Click!

The day I spent surfing 40 channels trying to find something entertaining or educational convinced me most of the people who appear on daytime television are as sick as most of the people who watch it.

"REPENT! REPENT, YOU SINNERS!" Click!

I couldn't keep the soaps' babes straight. They all wore makeup applied with a trowel and had glossy over-sized cranberry lips. Dialogue came in breathless staccato: "I LOVE you! I NEED you! I WANT TO HAVE (GIVE YOU) a baby! Hurry, we have to HIDE, here comes your (WIFE!) HUSBAND!" Click!

The next channel offered an explanation of how snakes shed their skin, including a slow-motion demonstration. Click! The home shopping channel featured a woman whose head was immobilized in hair spray exhorting viewers to hurry up and buy their genuine fake diamond necklace for $19.95 before all 826 of them sold in a heartbeat. Click! Another talk show hostess, this one in black leather, was interviewing a flashy lawyer left over from the O.J. trial. He wouldn't shut up so she just talked over him, both of them blathering at once. Click!

Sincere Male Talk Show Host: "It must be terrible to be covered with all those tumors" (camera moves in for close-up of multiple bumps all over woman's sweaty face)"How does it feel to be so, well, so different?" Sobbing guest: "I feel like a freak and" Click!

Daytime TV is intellectual junk food; lousy, over-cooked ingredients that aren't good for you. The day I spent surfing 40 channels trying to find something entertaining or educational convinced me most of the people who appear on daytime television are as sick as most of the people who watch it. They do not have jobs; do not vote; can't get their bills paid; don't know who's vice president; can't spell millennium and don't care.

Network and cable honchos pander to the lowest common denominator. Former FCC chairman Newton Minnow warned us TV could become a "vast wasteland." More likely it's a "vast junkyard" of recycled sob-stories, phony exposes and escalating violence and exploitation for stagnant brains that stalled out before they graduated from high school.

One last attempt with the remote control got me CNN and Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the Supreme Court presiding over the impeachment trial of President William Jefferson Clinton. Another obscene spectacle. Click!

© Copyright 1998-2000 The Women Syndicate. The content on these pages is the property of The Women Syndicate and may not be used without express permission. Contact friends@tadbartimus.com