To watch television is to witness thousands of deaths each year. On the streets, on the battlefronts, on the highways. However, the two most horrific deaths you'll witness tonight are the slow but inexorable deaths of Democracy and Domesticity.
Each death is a ghoulish yet subtle dance whose steps at first seem altogether familiar and innocent. Once something becomes innocent, it's harder to detect its ghoulishness.
Take Democracy....We were taught in school that its cherished liberties depend upon an active and informed citizenry. Active is easy, informed is not! Watch the day-and-nightly ways in which the citizenry out there is wowed and wooed by the latest slash-ad campaigns...big-name endorsements...smartly orchestrated rallies...especially prime-time camera-time carefully allocated by the media. Watch carefully, because what we're watching is well funded marketing of human products in the name of Democracy.
Take Domesticity...We have grown up with the assumption it-takes-a-family to make up a neighborhood, then a community, and ultimately a country. I mean, there's all that home-is-where-the-heart-is stuff from our movies and Mothers Day cards, right? Wrong! Over the years, the home is often where the family occasionally meet for dinner, in between school, jobs, games, and exotic finding-myself-experiences. Homes, such as they are in today's fast mobile culture, look more like sleeping quarters than their traditional image of character builders. Where few mothers any longer feel secure or fulfilled.
No doubt you've have heard the eloquent evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, speak of "memes." Something like the genes in biology, memes are said to be the ideas floating around in a culture like living organisms. The vector of their transmission from one person to another is language by which they leap from brain to brain.
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