Snow Blind

     One of my local TV news stations has a promo showing the weatherman flanked by the veteran anchorwoman and the young pretty reporter, all of them with jaw-straining smiles, announcing what'll be on tomorrow morning's show.  Taking quick turns, each puts in a datum, an enticement to watch, concluding with "We're giving away a snowblower!"
     The winner will receive a machine that will need fuel, maintenance, and housing.  The new owner's prize means work.  His city's ordinances include keeping his front publicly used sidewalk
"clean" after snowfalls.
     Use of a snowblower beats a shovel, I admit.  Still, the prizewinner will have a heavy piece of equipment to operate and store.  It may last five years or eight, maybe two before needing repairs.
     On Fox, an NFL game between the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings has, as decoration, a military theme.  A baby-faced Navy enlisted man stands at attention, expressionless, a sentinel.  If he's watching the game, he also looks like he might wave flags to signal "go" to a fighter jet pilot on his way to dismember human beings who don't speak English.  One of the announcers reminds us that it's important to support our troops, that "this is the greatest country in the world."  The small towels carried by the players are camouflage.  Shiny olive drab jackets worn by coaching staffs of both teams have American flag patches sewn on the upper sleeves.
     The other announcer expressed his eagerness to watch the Fox TV show 9-1-1.  Judging from ads, the show combines the 1970s show about paramedics, Emergency!, with contemporary unrealistic cop drama (Angela Bassett, a Black actress, plays a police sergeant), and firefighters.  Throw in Baywatch lifeguards and the L.A. porn industry and the show would be complete.  I haven't seen the show, don't want to, but it's illustrative of what passes for serious network television in this post-9/11 mediascape.
     9/11, the catastrophic event seventeen years ago, is now a TV series, 9-1-1.  Starting in Season Two, Jennifer Love Hewitt has joined the cast as the best-looking 911 dispatcher ever.  Hewitt was the Ghost Whisperer in 107 episodes, a woman who could communicate with the dead, acting as a conduit between the ghost's troubled loved ones, enabling all parties to reconcile and say farewell.  What I saw of that series a decade ago was at times impressive as drama, even if not realistic (given the supernatural premise).  Still, Ghost Whisperer was more human, more capable of demonstrating emotions and soulful concerns than most if not all of the cop shows or military themed programs on TV today.
     SEAL Team, a CBS show in its second season, depicts its military men as troubled, intense, yes, but not the hard core killers they probably are by now, given that the SEALs have been operating covertly and murderously during the entire seventeen years since 9/11.  On October 17 I saw part of one episode.  The Wikipedia description follows:

     "While holding a funeral for Alana, Jason is forced to step down as team leader to focus on his children, with fellow SEAL Adam Seaver taking his place.  Ray joins the rest of the team at Jason's request and is deployed to Mumbai to rescue a foreign service officer, only to find out their hostage has been relocated."

     Mumbai, India?  Not Pakistan, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Syria?
     Jason loves his children so much that he's "forced" to focus on them.  The bit that I saw showed a daughter of around thirteen years trying to communicate with her monosyllabic and preoccupied father.  He obviously would prefer to be aiming his gun at a Muslim.
     It isn't big news that TV fails the human mind.  Not always the case.  David Attenborough's documentaries about life on Earth, with their crisp, spectacular cinematography showing places and animals you never imagined existed, edify the brain and heart, inducing awe, plus a sense of poignancy and impending loss, since so much of what he shows and narrates about is dying out and will be lost due to the follies of human neglect and ambition.
     Eye candy showing a luscious 911 dispatcher, played by someone who used to address the ghosts of our painful new century, doesn't stimulate anything other than the parts of our minds given to sensationalism, and isn't that what most news is?
     Enter a contest and you may win a snowblower, or witness a gorgeous actress taking desperate calls in a show obliquely named after the key event at the beginning of this century, the spark that's destroyed so many possibilities, growing conditions for lies, like the one that hooks militarism to sporting contests and gives us so many TV entertainment shows which make no sense in terms of human realities.

                                                                               Vic Neptune