In this book I suggest shooting your TV, instead of giving it away, because if you give the damned machine as a present to someone, it will just hurt him instead of hurting you.

That's right, hurt! I'm not joking at all when I suggest the destruction of the TV machine... because it's destroying us. In my opinion, it's US or THEM, and so far, they're winning!

I don't think it's insane to suggest that the United States is the first country on earth to have been more or less ruined by television, and that other countries are following fast in our wake and are on the verge of the same kind of destruction.

I'm hoping that when the reader has read my little essay, he will take a gun and shoot his TV (or sink it in the nearest pond or reduce it to rubble with a hammer) and that, if enough readers do that, we may release our country (and our minds) from the blight which is destroying them.

When the atomic bomb first appeared, it was considered the biggest threat to human civilization ever invented by mankind. It isn't.

"The major message of TV is that if you can't find an equitable solution in 25 minutes, just shoot your adversary."

Michael T. Lynch

The studies made by sociologists say it all. One of the most recent studies done in America was so alarming that it even got a lot of space in La Repubblica, one of Italy's top dailies. The headline was terrifying: 'American children watch over 100,000 hours of violence by the age of ten,' it said. When one read into the fine print, it appeared that the headline writer had misread the story... for the text said that American children had seen over 100,000 acts of violence by the time they reached age 10. Not 'hours of violence', just 'acts of violence', but the difference is irrelevant... even 100,000 acts is plenty.

Too much! The article said that the study also revealed that by age ten the average American child had witnessed over 8,000 murders on TV! Germany estimates that its own TV shows seventy homicides shown per day... that's over twenty-five thousand a year. At that rate, you're talking about a strange form of worship of evil.

These figures are alarming in themselves, but especially so when seen in the light of numerous studies which indicate clearly that witnessing violence on TV encourages and increases violence in behavior among young children!

The TV thus becomes, among other things, a school of violent and aggressive behavior.

Why do we allow this school to function unabated? Since 1946, when TV became a force in our lives, violence has increased at an exponential rate in our society. Doesn't anyone make the connection? The facts in these studies are widely published, yet the networks go on gaily spreading violence across the tube and into the minds of our children (and our adults), and parents coast-to-coast go on sending their children into the TV room to 'keep them quiet,' (and make them what?)

Why? One evening a friend of mine received a call from her eight-year-old daughter.

'When are you coming home, Mom?' 'In a little while. Just watch TV until I get there.'

'But there's murder on all the channels,' replied her daughter. 'From out of the mouths of babes!' Many years later, this little true tale still curdles my blood. Not only are the TV airways loaded with violence... something there's nothing else on!

Even more dangerous than the quantity of violence on TV is the way TV modifies the quality of violence. TV violence is two-dimensional, theatrical, and false. As such, it shows us the 'positive' and fascinating use of violence without ever showing us its real ugliness and pain. We thus not only show our children endless scenes of violence, but also strip the violence of its repugnant and terrifying side, 'clean it up for prime time,' as it were, and thus make it more attractive.

Anyone who has witnessed real violence in the street, in a public place, in a home, knows how dreadful an experience it is. TV defuses this dread by carefully detaching from violence almost all of its awful consequences. In real life, violence leads to screams, endless pain, months of hospitalization, a life on crutches or in wheelchairs, etc. TV violence seldom leads to any of these.

The coyote pushed off a thousand-foot cliff and splattered on the rocks below miraculously springs to life, unscarred, in the next scene. Gunshot, stabbing, and beating victims conveniently die in silence, without much obvious pain, and almost never need treatment. TV violence victims being loaded into ambulances almost never groan or weep or even complain of pain... how miraculous! Moreover, TV almost never shows us the victims weeks or months after they've been beaten or shot, still in hospitals, in shock, in pain, on crutches, vomiting on themselves, wishing they were dead. We never see them suffering in dentist chairs having partials built to replace the teeth which the aggressor has knocked out. We never see them dying in the terrible agony of peritonitis from knife wounds and bullet wounds. Victims of violence on TV seldom seem to suffer at all. Thus, TV violence carries a profound message at a sub-conscious level, 'It doesn't hurt someone very much when you beat, stab, or shoot him.' This generalization is only one of the many lies dispensed by TV every day, but one of the most dangerous.

The constant depiction of inter-human violence on TV is an implicit statement, 'This is how humans naturally behave.' In the human society depicted on TV, violence is no longer an aberration, an insanity, a horror --- it's a normal and expected human behavior pattern. TV depicts a human race which resorts to violence with incredible ease and frequency.... and by holding up this false 'mirror' of humanity, paints a completely distorted picture for young minds in formation of what is 'normal' behavior. God help us! Then, when these young minds start putting into action the lesson which we've spent fifteen or twenty years cramming into their psyches via the airways, we naively ask, 'Why is violence on the increase?'

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the U.S. In 1990 Italian TV, started broadcasting an American series which they called 'The Vigilante,' (in America, 'The Equalizer.') It's about a prosperous American businessman who takes over where the police leave off. On average, he shoots and kills about three human beings per one-hour show. Since the Italians ran this series daily, Italians saw one American urban dweller murdering approximately fifteen people a week.

Of course all the violence in this show was dressed-for-prime-time violence... no-one cries in pain, bleeds excessively, nor requires hospitalization. The slaughtered victims just fall silently and die quickly, giving the viewer and the murderous protagonist a good feeling of having improved the planet by the elimination of some sub-human scum.

Note, too, the time-slot chosen for this film by the Italian network... 6:30 PM, about 90 minutes before Italian dinner time, when few adults are home yet from work and the mass of TV viewers are school kids! Here's a case of the Italian government (!) using tax money to purchase and air a film series which teaches the young viewer that it's quite alright to ursurp the duties of the police and to shoot wrong-doers without due process of arrest and trial.

A similar world of irreality is seen in Kung Fu, the telefilm starring David Carradine, which depicts adventures of a Chinese priest who has inexpicably landed in the American Far West. As a 'holy man' Carradine eschews the use of a pistol and deals with his enemies by bare-hand martial-art tricks learned when a young monk in China. Here the exultation of violence is done with even more subtlety than in 'The Equalizer', for Carradine masquerades as a 'non-violent being.' Despite this cloak of non-violent philosophy he finally, usually towards the end of the hour, gets sufficiently riled and turns very violent indeed! Though he doesn't kill as many people as the pistol-bearing vigilante, he does manage to seriously maim (broken legs, cracked skulls, crushed ribs) at least three adversaries per show.

What these two shows have in common is that the violence is being done by the 'good' guy or hero, that it's cleaned-up-for-TV violence, and that the perpetrator is never punished nor even charged for the murders or maimings he commits. (In Carradine's case, the protagonist always moves on to another town before the sheriff gets around to questioning him... in the vigilante's case, he's apparently such a prosperous, respectable citizen that the police don't dare or don't care to pester him about a little thing like killing some local scum.)

For where this kind of education leads, consider the following article from 'La Stampa,' Milan's leading newspaper.

...

Thousands leave due to fear of violent children,
experts say 'It's TV's fault.'

Teachers flee baby-delinquents

Germany, creches are like gangs

Bonn Apr. 30, 1993

They're leaving by the thousands, sometimes after years in the profession, sometimes without even a pension or compensation. Always more numerous, and almost everywhere. For all of them, teachers in day-care centers in Hamburg or Cologne, the reason is the same: children between the ages of three and six are becoming more and more violent, and teaching and controlling them is becoming more difficult. The pychological (and sometimes) physical stress of an already difficult profession is becoming more intense.

... Seventy percent of the teachers who have recently abandoned the profession have blamed their decision by on "the aggessiveness of the children," on their "tendency to create conflict," beginning as young as age three. We found ourselves powerless, they say, without any way of resolving the conflicts, totally without effectiveness.

Sixty percent of those who have not resigned admit that they, too, are considering quitting, as their colleagues have done, and for the same reason. Better to remain at home, they say, than to exercise a profession full of anxiety and futility.

It happens without warning. A fight breaks out in an apparently 'normal' class, among children from various type of backgrounds. A push, or a spit in the face, suddenly causes a reaction which quickly degerates into violence and rioting. "It's our daily reality. The children are much more violent than they used to be, and their fights are more and more brutal," says a female teacher in a nursery school in Hamburg, a woman with twenty-five years of teaching behind her.

"The number of difficult children continues to increase. Five percent of those between three and six are violent, and in some centers, it's as high as twenty percent," confirms Klaus Hurrelman, a German expert on child behavior. ... Sometimes it takes as little as a mean look or an unintended offense to provoke a fight among play companions. Sometimes, a single child manages to involve the entire group, or nearly. The teachers feel completely impotent faced with this problem. One of them stated, 'Our working conditions, already difficult, have become impossible, we're fed up.'

Why this explosion of juvenile violence which, according to the investigations being made, appears as well at other levels of education, from the elementary schools to the junior high schools, where aggressive behavior has also become 'the norm'? First of all, due to the difficult family conditions of many of the pre-school children... and then there's the TV, which for a while now has been uder criticism in Germany. Every day, it's been calculated, it shows seventy homicides and each week, 2700 scenes of violence.

Emanuele Novazio La Stampa Friday, April 30, 1993

Millions of Americans have learned the alphabet by watching Sesame Street. Some educators even claim that millions of Americans have learned to read the same way. This one show, considered a 'quality' show by most Americans and fed to kids with great relief by parents ('at least something good for the kids to watch') carries with it an insidious danger.... sameness.

The 'quality' of Sesame Street which makes it so popular with parents is essentially what makes the show so dangerous. Every day tens of millions of American kids are planted in front of the TV by their parents to watch this 'good' (i.e. non-violent and educational) show.

What almost all of these millions of parents fail to ask themselves is this question: Is it good for my child to watch exactly the same thing as twenty million other kids every day?

To what extent do you want your children to resemble all the other children in the United States? Do you really think it's good for them to digest the identical visual pablum being ingested by most of the other kids on the block (and in the nation) on a given day? Is it good for them to experience exactly the same mental challenges, jokes, visual gags, colors, teachers, images, voices, and hidden attitudes as half the kids in the country?

Certainly one of the great dangers in the United States is the force of conformity which crushes originality and independent thought in the individual citizen. I believe that the Founding Fathers of our nation would be aghast at the leveling effect of TV, the ease with which identical information and entertainment can be simultaneously loaded into millions and even tens of millions of young minds.

Just because it's 'good' doesn't mean, automatically, that it's good for everyone.

Chapter 3: Mood Manipulation

One morning I arose to find two house guests sitting in the bright sunshine of my kitchen in the most despondent state. It was a gorgeous summer morning, and I couldn't imagine what could have plunged these two normally-cheerful friends into such obvious depression. 'What's wrong?' I asked.

'Oh,' said one of them, gloomily, 'we just heard the weather forecast and it's going to be a rotten day!'

'And that's why you're sitting there with those hang-dog expressions?' 'Sure,' said the other, 'it's awful news, I mean, we've only got these two days.'

'Would you please look out the window?' I said. 'What do you see?' 'Well, I see gorgeous sunshine, but...'

'Marblehead is a peninsula,' I said, 'and has its own micro-climate. We often have quite different weather than what they're having in Boston, eighteen miles away. Cheer up. It is a gorgeous day, and will probably continue to be so!'

The weather that day turned out perfect, and that little incident gave me a lot of food for thought. My friends had picked up the weather report from the radio, not from the TV, but that was irrelevant. What was striking was that they were ready to believe the predictions of the radio more than the evidence of their senses! It was a horrifying little illustration of how the airwaves have real power to poison our lives. Their day was ruined by the time I had walked in on them in the kitchen, not by any physical reality or fact, but merely by an opinion uttered by some total stranger sitting in a far-away radio studio. If I hadn't intervened, they might have spent most of the day in a saddened state of mind awaiting a fictitious rainstorm that would never come.

I wonder if Lee DeForest, when he invented the vacumn tube, realized that radio (and then TV) would develop into powerful mood-manipulation devices? Who could have foreseen, when the invention was just beginning to function, that one day it would become a black magic device by which a single man could say words in one place and in a few seconds darken the good mood of thousands of people in every direction! The most nefarious sorcerers of the Middle Ages never had power like that!

People like myself, who often live abroad, are more able to gauge this kind of mood-modifying effect of TV (and radio) because they escape from the airwaves atmosphere of the country long enough to really see it (i.e. hear it) when they return. For example, after living eight years in Italy, and watching a lot of TV there, I returned to the States to work and noticed, almost immediately, that besides the ads and the entertainment, American TV was handing out a lot of mood-modifying information and opinion, and I don't mean just weather reports. After a week or two back in the States, I noticed that I was being told by the TV, in myriad ways, 'You're going to die!'

Well, that may be a slight exaggeration of the message. Maybe it was 'You're probably going to die of cancer,' or possibly merely, 'Lots of people are going to die of cancer,' or possibly only, 'This and that and this too cause cancer,' or 'Lots of people are being raped, shot, stabbed, and beaten to death,' but I was astonished, and shocked, by this difference between Italian and America TV. Whatever mood-modifying messages Italian TV was passing along, they didn't include this kind of constant prediction that your life was probably going to end in a horrible fashion. In the States, all the well-meaning warnings about cancer, heart-disease, crime, etc. added up to one conclusion: 'You're going to die a horrible death! (And, if you're a woman, you're also probably going to get raped because the world is just full of men dying to rape women.)'

The justification is, of course, that by telling people how dangerous it is to smoke, or to eat certain things or to have too many X-rays and so forth you'll get them to modify their behavior and thus you'll save some lives. However, my feeling is that instead of saving lives, this kind of terrifying propaganda and doomsday talk simply ruins everyone's life by bringing a totally unnecessary shadow of gloom into it.

Sure, we're all going to die, eventually. And some of us will be victims of wanton violence. (That's been happening since the beginning of civilization.) Does that mean that five or ten or one hundred times a week we need to be reminded of it? Is that good for us, or is it really awful? (I think it's awful.) And what's more awful still is that this scare psychosis, this 'you're gonna die!' message which the TV spreads with such persistence and such glee, is actually 'invisible' to most Americans. It's the psychological water in which we swim, when we watch TV, only noticeable to someone who's been living without it for ten years and suddenly finds himself immersed in it.

An alarming aspect of this kind of mood-modifying propaganda is that no-one really plans it. I don't suppose that representatives from all the major networks sit down somewhere in a room once a month and say to each other things like, 'Well, they don't seem to be scared enough yet, we're going to have to increase the frequency of those lung cancer spots and those talk-show sessions about the danger of cancer, guys! And maybe throw in a few more hours of special reports on murder and the danger in the streets.' There's no single person or committee anywhere in charge of doing this kind of mood-manipulation... like Topsy, it just grows, out of control, invisible, and, I believe, very damaging to American psyches, very damaging to the peace of mind of Americans from ages 1 to 101.

Even the ads do it. A TV ad for a Diehard batteries shows a lady in a lonely parking lot at night in a car that won't start. The starter churns and churns, the battery grows weaker. Does some nice gentleman come along and help the lady with a jump-start? No, the music, lighting, and editing are all chosen to create fear... no-one comes along, but we all get nervous watching this ad, it's clear that something terrible is going to happen to this poor lady in this deserted lot! Of course we don't see it happen, we don't have to, the implication is enough to frighten us all into buying a DieHard battery tomorrow morning! The assumption (lesson) of the ad is that a woman alone, with a car that won't start, is in horrendous danger, liable to get killed or raped instead of assisted! Is this a valid assumption? I think not. It's a lie! I believe the great majority of American men, despite TV propaganda, on finding a woman in trouble, will try to help her, not rape her. But diabolically clever ads like these spread unwarranted panic, and add to our fears and depression.

(Such ads may also actually encourage people to become rapists, by depicting women alone in parking lots at night as helpless, flustered, and without any protection from police or bystanders. At the very least the ad suggests to any potential rapists a good place go go looking for a victim, if they want to get started.)

A tremendous number of our citizens are permanently depressed. A large percentage of our citizenry need tranquilizers, alcohol, and drugs to get through every day of their lives. Many criminals say that they have been pushed into crime by their state of depression. We have so many neurotic citizens that our insane asylums are turning them away, and entire streets of our cities are lined with insane but non-violent psychiatric misfits on out-patient tranquilizer treatment. Yet no-one seems to be looking for the source of this amazingly-widespread national depression.

You don't have to look far. Just look at that TV in every American living room (and bar.) Watch it enough hours each week and you'll get depressed. They don't plan to do that to you, they just do it.

...

In May of 1993, veteran British newscaster Martyn Lewis, in a lecture delivered in the United States, made a plea for more good news on television. He claimed that the bias against the positive means that television offers 'a distorted mirror of events.' He said,

'Try to sell any TV news editor a story of success or achievement. Unless it is a relatively "slow" news day, reactions range from "Sorry, no room" to "Not a puff for that" or, grudgingly, "We're looking a bit thin -- it might make a couple of lines.

'Over a period of time, there is a relentless dripfeed into the viewer's mind that we live in a society where achievement takes a back seatt to conflict, disaster, and failure.'

Lewis went on in his lecture to point out how three British firms, Triumph, British Steel, and Rover, all made TV headline news when they were in trouble, losing money, and laying off workers, and how subsequently, when each company made an extraordinary comeback, they were almost never mentioned in the news. For example: 'Yet in 1988/90, when British Steel produced a profit of 733 million pounds, making it one -- if not the -- most successful private steel companies in the world, it rated a mention on only one of the daily TV news bulletins.'

The broadcaster also pointed out that 'the miner's strike in Britain in 1983 dominated TV news for many weeks... but where was the national TV news when miners were breaking productivity record after record throughout the Eighties? That barely merited a mention -- and yet those successes are part of the fabric of understanding what is happening in the mining industry.'

He cited another striking example in the world of sports: 'Watching the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, I was astounded to learn that Britain produced no fewer than 25 champions in 1992. Yet only six of them made it on to the TV news. How can we ever upgrade achievement in our national life when national television puts so much of it on the back-burner?'

Mr. Lewis' conclusion: 'We consign viewers to growing up in a relentless culture of negativity -- of naturally expecting things to go wrong and finding it even harder to believe that anything in life is achievable.'

The final words of Mr. Lewis' conclusion are worth underlining, for they are the crux of the matter. The net effect of this bias in reporting by TV is that the viewer finds it harder to believe that anything in life is achievable. Look at the attitudes which TV news is fostering in the minds of old and young alike! What a legacy for our citizens to receive from TV!

With Mr. Lewis' observations in mind, can we be one hundred percent certain that the causes of the great recession of the 90's are purely economic?

One of the first changes which occurred when I suddenly stopped watching TV was a remarkable change in my mood... for the better. I don't think that's just a coincidence.

Instead of putting depressed people on tranquilizers right away (drugs which decrease their alertness, their sexual energy and their vitality) doctors might simply start by confiscating their TVs. It would do most of them a lot more good.