I am living in a more openly carnal public world than once I knew. Some factors are better, and some are inferior to contexts of yesteryears. Negative factors appear here. The affirmatives are reserved for another Page. Our town’s local cable TV provider sent an advertisement urging me to subscribe to new digital programming. The appeal appeared in a short paragraph: Charter gives you access to great premium channels and shows, including all the award-winning original programming and box office hits on HBO: like Spider-Man, Panic Room, The Sopranos, Sex and the City and HBO World Championship Boxing. They promise to add only $9.95 to my monthly bill. I would not add them if I were paid well by anyone to include them.
Are these programs beneficial additions for anyone? Spider-Man doesn’t qualify as a myth. Myths have elements of life reality in them teaching some lesson. Spider-Man may attract attention, because of the exotic presentation, but the films hardly rate with meaningful drama. Panic Room is not known to me, but the title informs me that I have no interest in it. The Sopranos, as I understand the series, is about crime, gross characters, using gutter language supposedly to achieve reality for crime. Listeners/watchers find it slathered with the social and personal garbage of low life, persons who seem to have no clue about how to gain values and models – or teach them. Sex and The City, if I am clear about its format, is the fantasy life of several women who talk about and practice various sexual interests without adequate perception about what either sex or the city really mean, and how both might contribute to society and morality at improved levels. When it comes to boxing, even the writers who cover boxing openly acknowledge that the sport is at low ebb, that it is brutal, second rate and money-driven. I should pay $9.95 for all that fare to be introduced into my home? No way, not in my home.
The above remarks belong to other negative observations one might make for some programs. Programs like Howard Stern, Anna Nicole Smith, Jerry Springer and others appear to have no social value. Persons appearing often seem to have lost human dignity. We are disappointed with the increasing effort in TV to break through social and personal inhibitions about nudity, violence, swearing, prevailing gossip and innuendo about celebrities, leaders, and many making media news. Too little is done, in the mainstream, to dramatize affirmative role-models, to tell the stories of valued events, to seek wholesome purpose. Producers may believe that both entertainment and high values can’t be joined. If declining values can be entertaining, is there not a cadre of persons who will use the high road of values and entertain at the same time? It can be done: it has been done. Some professional persons with little general support continue to use the marvelous tools for good purpose, especially in education – both formal and casual.
The citizenry buys what is offered, or it would not be aired. Carnality or oddity is award winning. Apparently awards justify patterns. Man was not created to cater to his lower instincts, but higher. The lower emerged openly in time. Historians tend to agree that nations sink under the weight of popular cultural excesses. Media show lack of social duty when the darker side of culture is featured, and becomes general education, perhaps inadvertent, for the populace. How could so great a vehicle as television and electronic gadgetry become a social garbage bin? Part of education relates to the warm distraction, we call entertainment, a necessary life factor. By it we gain temporary relief from duty, but inspiration to better performance. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020