G.I. Gurdjieff and walking through the desert on stilts…

For anyone who has studied some of the great 19th and 20th century philosophers, life today must seem so incongruous and completely disjointed. G.I. Gurjieff spoke of walking through the desert on stilts as a reference to the thinking man on his trip through the world of non-critical thinkers. In our modern culture, nothing defines a desert so well as the landscape of that media we call television.

Does the number of real estate infomercials on television say anything about the sorry state of television today? It does if you believe that people today live lives that are more diverse than 25 years ago. I remember, when I was a child, that ‘life’ was going to get so much more different , because the world was getting to be a 24 hour place of business. People were going to be working all different times of the day or night, with days off not just on the traditional weekend.

To look at late night television, it would seem that everyone is at home all over the world by 7 PM, and tucked safely into bed by 11 PM, just in time to watch the news and go off to dreamland. For those poor souls not able to be part of this Norman Rockwell existence, life in the wee hours is bleak unless one has premium cable or satellite. Why should this be? Is the ’susceptible to 60 second sales pitches’ gene only expressed during the daylight hours? I’m fairly sure my ability to recognize something I need doesn’t change radically when the sun goes down.

Even during the daylight and early evening hours, television has become dull and predictable. Is it true that every story has already been told? If one looks at the big three networks, the answer must surely be yes. Nothing new or exciting has come from these venues in years. (I think the last program on television that amazed me from networkdom was ‘The West Wing.’ This wasn’t so much because of the liberal slant of the show, which I happen to subscribe to, but the amazing quality of the writing. The stories paralleled the current news, so no surprises there, however, the characters were so well fleshed out that in many story lines the immediacy of things was palpable.)

The worst thing about new shows on television is that anything not immediately accessible to someone with double-digit IQ is off the air almost before the ink on the first few scripts is dry. Any programming that provokes thought or demands concentration on the part of the viewer is strickly verboten. A look at the BBC programming available on cable or satellite makes one wonder what was left behind in England when the settlers came across the ocean, because a world of difference in programming exists there. The viewer is not just the object of a sales pitch. The comprehension level of each program is not forced down to 4th grade level.

For those of us dissatisfied with this reality, which mirrors many other differences in life, relating to geography, the line for a long vacation to the outlying bounds of sanity forms to the right.

[tags]G.I. Gurjieff, television, tv, pop culture, late night television, late night tv[/tags]