(Breaking This Week: YES Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and it seems pretty likely there's a stolen presidential election. Wha. . .?! All the stuff coming out now about keeping sordid details of the Biden family out of the news before the election clearly means the evil side of government wanted to deny Trump another term via censorship, denials and outright lies. Whistleblowers have come forward and they seem to have more integrity than Garland himself could comprehend. Please, will somebody clean out the prisons and get them ready for the people who actually belong there, many with a "D" in their political background?) Onward. . .
When Newton Minow was chief of the FCC back in the sixties, he referred to the television industry's offerings as a "vast wasteland," a term he happily borrowed from a friend who happened to offer his own description of TV broadcasts.
Minow spoke those words during 1961 conference proceedings conducted by the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C. While praising a slim number of programs then displayed upon national TV screens, Minow then said something not only indicative for his era, but almost prophetic for our own future:
"You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials --many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few."
WELL, here we are, 2023's TV -- and motion pictures -- is 1961 on steroids.
I thought of Minow because of the strike currently involving actors, writers and -- most unfortunately -- people who generally don't get paid much by the industry. But there's more at stake for everybody here and it's called WOKE.
Hollywood and other places where TV shows and motion pictures are produced currently suffer from "Woke" silliness, the nonsense that somehow defies logic and gets away with it.
Trouble is, the mainstream TV and motion picture audience has reached a limit, tired to the hilt of the woke crowd -- likely a minority of strong voices -- and its lies. But, no matter -- writers and actors who climbed upon the woke bullshit wagon and ate from it ravenously now wouldn't know reality or GOOD writing and acting if either was explained in a simple nursery rhyme.
Or, to spell it out, mainstream people aren't interested in TV shows about transgender angst, same-sex people kissing one another passionately or stories dripping with males fluffed with estrogen emotions as tears and endlessly monotonous talk carry on from one scene to the next.
We hoped not to sound too critical, but the truth is that the wonderful TV and motion picture writers who often cut their creative teeth on events of World War II, Korea and even Vietnam are disappearing one by one, leaving behind a clueless mishmash of young writers whose life experiences frequently reach no further than the ski trips they took with college or high school friends, or maybe with books they scanned for only minutes because of their attention deficit disorders.
One thing these striker folk seem to agree upon is artificial intelligence, which they fear could take over much of the industry. They are quite right to be in fear, because AI is ready, willing and able. I don't know how its influence can be avoided, even if one writes a bad TV script sending AI to some other planet. Beware, because the day will come when AI even outsmarts the big unions -- though I'm not sure that will be a bad thing for the real America.
Anybody in the TV and film industry who isn't paying attention to the "why" of Disney's current decline along with, apparently, the entire Anheuser-Busch beer industry, may be self-punished in the long run. The malady is called "woke" and its less-regarded overseer is known as E.S.G.
MEANWHILE, as the TV industry (commercial, cable, and satellite) searches for a reason to remain relevant, can't you just imagine intense meetings among TV bosses to make sure that every LENGTHY commercial break happens at almost exactly the same times on every network? Like prison, there shall be no escape. The other thing is, particularly among smaller networks, the tendency to chop up old TV episodes and movies and throw commercial breaks in at the whim of management appears suicidal in the long run. Not to mention that a lot of oldies seen on TV cost very little to procure for a showing or two or three or 500.
AND THE HELL CONTINUES: Both TV and radio changed for the worst when digital timing equipment took over, dictating the importance of bowing down to exact fractions of a second over relaxed activities. Now we have dead air, programs bleeding over one another and programs cut off before their time is up because the digital monster insists upon it as one commercial after another after 'nother is paraded before our apprehensive eyes and ears, often with no end in sight.
Aside from increasingly pedestrian scripts churned out by the "entertainment" (read as: dumbed down) industry, the cherry on the top of this dog pile of vast wasteland is TV network news -- you know, the broadcasts sponsored by drug pushers. No, wait, better make that pharmaceutical companies. Anyway, day after night after day the network anchors and other on-air personalities pretending to be fair journalists feed us lies disguised as balanced reporting, whilst totally leaving out things qualifying as real, legitimate stories.
TV industry veterans still around to declare they've seen it all sometimes openly say that the television is on its way out, replaced by streaming and other forms of communication -- yet, even streaming services, to their amazement, are losing money big time, with Netflix the only current player showing a clear profit.
As the writers and actors continue their strike, whether justified or not, maybe they don't see -- or maybe they do -- those bouncing weed-like objects blowing with the wind and dust in the background. Tumbleweeds? Tumbleweeds. But it's a special variety of Tumbleweeds, cutting a path to make the vast wasteland even more vast.
OH Canada! Hundreds of "wildfires" spewing smoke down into the states? I'm not ready to accept the wildness of so many fires -- but will certainly entertain the word, arson. . .by people with a climate change agenda, perhaps. Crackpot activists will usually do anything to create chaos for their cause -- and the fact that so many intellectually impaired U.S. politicians are mouthing the words CLIMATE CHANGE like parrots in relationship to forest fires (?!) would be exactly the result desired.
We must always remember, even as John Kerry and various celebs circumnavigate the globe (using polluting jets) with tales of climate change fantasies, that there is always precedent for climate activity, be it good or devastating. Look to the sun, look to weather patterns -- and look to your friendly local meteorologist who knows what's real but is probably muzzled by his or her employers and therefore is unable to tell us it's really just another day in the history of a planet battered long before we or our SUVs arrived on the scene.
