My motto is I hate to spectate. I can't go out to a concert, or a dance recital, and just sit there and spectate. It seems silly to me to go out and watch others perform. And yet I sit at home and watch hour after hour of television. I sit still and spectate.
Television is hypnotic, and best of all, you can enjoy it in the comfort of your home -- prone, supine, laid back, sedated, tranquilized, narcotized. It is there, available at any hour of the day or night. Click, it's on -- and you search for something to sooth your strained nerves, to take you away from reality -- from whatever world you are inhabiting. TV silences the mind. You can't think your own thoughts and watch TV. And, to make sure you have no thoughts, the TV constantly bombards you with pictures -- images in addition to words.
You can't imagine. You can't associate. You can't create an image from your past. Your mind is overtaken, jammed with image after image after image that they have created. We tell others to shut up, if they dare interrupt our TV watching. We can't have thoughts of our own while the images they create second by second invade our minds, take over our minds.
To a certain extent it is not a hostile takeover. We are willing hostages. we want to be, taken over. We want to cease to be here, to cease being ourselves to be overwhelmed, in a sense raped by our captor.
Rape is not too strong a word. Rape means to forcibly penetrate. To enter without permission. Electronic messages force their way into our minds. They penetrate. They enter and colonize our mind. My mind hums commercial messages: "You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with pepsodent."
Here is a great poetic line I've never forgotten. "If the mind of the teacher is not in love with the mind of the student, he is committing rape." It is rape to force your ideas into an unwilling mind which you do not love. We must respect our students or we are committing rape--forcibly brainwashing them. I feel I am not forcing my ideas into their minds because I love them as human beings and I am trying to teach them to think clearly. True, I also get paid to do this.
Teaching them does mean, in part, forcing my ideas of what constitutes clear thinking into their minds. The mind of the teacher must be in love with the mind of the student or the teacher is committing rape. Those words were written by Adrienne Rich, a great contemporary American poetess.
To get back to my original point. a kind of rape is being committed by those who create TV -- they are forcing ideas into viewers minds, even if the viewers are willing victims they are still victims, helpless before a force that enters, penetrates, educates, brainwashes.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein