Saxon's Survival Hour #188: You Can't Change the Channel

Today's excerpt begins on page 99 of The Survivor Volume 1.

A while back I saw a funny and tragic cartoon in a magazine.
It showed a car pulled over to the side of the road.
A harried and exhausted mother was inside, flanked by some miserable children who plainly didn't like the situation at all.
The father was outside, trying to pump up a flat tire.

While hard at work trying to save their vacation, the father was saying, "But kids, this is real.
This is life.
We can't change the channel".

The cartoon showed the absurdity of the children's confusion between reality and TV.
I got a charge out of it because it paralleled the American adult's confusion between real world conditions and pure entertainment.

Now, I don't mean to imply that the American adult is so moronic as to mistake real news footage of the carnage in Beirut with the fictional cops-and-robbers carnage on the next channel.
However, watching TV has become the major occupation of the average American, especially city folk.
This can't be discounted when considering their inability, or downright refusal, to accept the warnings so apparent to Survivalists.

Before TV, movies were certainly an influence.
But you had to leave home to see a movie.
You chose what you wanted to see and accepted the fact that you were being entertained.
After the delightful fantasy was over, you walked out into the cold night.
There were the derelicts, shambling up to the movie leavers to beg for booze money.
A couple in an upstairs room screaming obscenities at each other.
A firetruck barreling around the corner to save some wretched smoker from an ignited mattress.

All this broke the mood.
Unpleasantly, of course, but at least helped to put things back in their proper perspective.

The viewer of TV can go from Boob-tube to beddy-by without his fantasy mood being broken in fact, with several channels, he can maintain his fantasies from the time he gets home from his boring job until he goes to sleep.

Over the years, the average American has selected a set of fantasies and maintained them for hours each day.
Mood breaking reality is avoided.
An excellent example of this is a commercial for CARE.
It shows children in Darkest Somewhere or Other, with their pot bellies.
Pitiful.
A child viewer whines, ' Why do we have to watch this?"
The father figure then reads from his script that we must help these people, of course, the poor little tykes in the film had probably died before the footage was shown, but the commercial still points out the reality avoidance of the average viewer,

This was also shown during the coverage of the Democratic Convention.
All it really amounted to was the posturing and ranting of a lot of political pigs wanting to get at the public trough.
But it did give a pretty thorough rundown of the ills besetting our nation.
The networks reasoned that during this coverage, they lost about two-thirds of their viewers to other channels.

Moneysworth, July 19, reported that even in Russia the TV viewers tune out socially relevant programs in favor of movies, quiz and variety shows.

Most people are bored with their daily routine.
They are also anxious about the future.
Such a combination of boredom and anxiety creates stresses that only hours of fantasizing can relieve.

Since most of today's problems can't be solved by the individual as long as he stays in his rut.
He marks time on his job until he can go home to his own Disneyland.
During the day he will talk about sports and other programs he watched on TV.
He tries to recreate the dream world he finds most secure.

II you intrude on his daydreaming he is likely to try to change your channel and get you to echo his own fantasies.
Failing this, he will become grumpy and tune you out entirely.

Thus, few Americans communicate today apart from routine specifics or comparisons of whatever highs they experienced last night in front of the tube.
They are increasingly hard to reach with reality subjects which seem to threaten the continuance of their routine or their fantasy world.

Meanwhile at home, the women lead fantasy lives, identifying with their soap opera queens and their oh, so very sophisticated problems.
Women’s fantasy involvement with soap operas has been covered quite well without my help.
But it is increasingly evident that reality in the home is less important to the female than the fantasy world of her soaps.

A perfect example is Mary Hartman-Mary Hartman.
Mary is the Typical Consumer Housewife.
She can deal with waxy buildup and other problems solved by TV commercials.
Many social problems have their answers in TV characters who have also been there.

But does “As The World Turns" tell what to do when Leroy drowns in a bowl of chicken soup forced on him by Mary?
Does "Somerset" tell how to deal with the troubled lad who massacred the five-member Lombardi family, their two goats and eight chickens?

Mae gave Tom VD.
He gave it to Mary.
Looking for love and appreciation, Mary then made out with Sergeant Foley in his hospital bed while he was resting up from a heart attack.
All this would have been duck soup had only "General Hospital" handled it first.
But it didn’t, so what had poor Mary to go on?
She was shattered.

Confused wretch that she is, she’s picked as the Typical American Consumer Housewife.
Her selection is based on the fact that she is representative of most American housewives.
She has no hobbies, interests or ambition.
On the night of the award presentation she goes crazy on the David Suskind Show and we leave her in the nuthouse until September.
You see, confronted with real-life problems, Mary couldn't change the channel, so she came apart

Mary Hartman-Mary Hartman is believed to be a takeoff on soap operas.
But I see it as a takeoff on the American housewife, so caught up in soap operas, commercials and other mass media that she can’t function without their direction.

In a sense, men are worse off than women when it comes to problem solving through TV.
Sports are no help.
Sports heroes (?) are inspirational only to mentally defective youngsters.
When Jack Nicklaus hunkers before First Base, pitches the ball past the forty-yard line and sinks it in the basket, only a no-hoper would take heart.
But there are a lot of no-hopers out there, friend.
Men so devoid of intellect, so crushed by their own mediocrity, that a gum chewing, flank-scratching cretin symbolizes all that's manly and heroic.

In sports, the only enemy is the opposing player.
In Westerns and war movies the enemy is long dead or fictional.
Besides, the movie hero always wins.
A heady, but harmless drug, when taken sparingly.

Before TV these entertainments were usually strung out over weekends with a Saturday night movie and a Sunday game.
The mind could come awake between fantasies wherein the fantasizer is shooting at the Clantons at the OK Corral or playing football with the Giants.

The American male's identification with infantile sports and their players and with movie stars was simply recreation before TV.
But with TV, one can immerse himself in fantasies the whole weekend and for hours and hours each evening.
And the average man does, because he can't cope with the real world anymore.
Instead of trying to cope with today's problems, he has taken to fantasizing every waking, non-working hour.

This barrage of heroic imagery gives a person little lime to adjust to his own reality.
After an evening of mastering all his fantasy foes the dreamer goes to bed, then wakes up and is brutally thrust into the real world.

Still feeling heroic, he is forced into the wrong lane by some hot-rodding punk.
Then his boss snaps at him.
Normal setbacks and irritations, easily handled before TV are now too much for him.

Joe Namath or Burt Lancaster could handle such problems.
But a man fantasizing their roles finds himself more helpless in such situations than he used to be when he handled them alone.
Muscles and hot lead win the day on the screen but not on the highway or in the shop or office.

Since our TV addict spends more time in his fantasy world than away from it, he finds himself avoiding unpleasantness, rather than confronting it.
Last night he was tuned into a program on famine and saw that he couldn’t resolve the problem by clever footwork or a fast draw so he changed the channel.

Today he saw an old lady being mugged by two punks half his size.
But he'd left his gun and football shoes at home in the TV so he couldn't get involved.
In the case of the old lady he could change the channel simply by walking on.
But in his own life situation he can't change the channel except by quitting his job or by slugging someone and getting fired.
Barring this, he simply becomes more withdrawn.

HIs fantasy world is so much better than his real world that he increasingly shuts the real world out.
In a limited sense, he can change the channel in this way.
In only a few hours he will be back in front of the tube and be rid of this irritation.
Thus, he will not become involved.
He will accept no more responsibility.
He won't stand up to a bullying foreman.
After all, in a few hours he will gun the oaf down, along with the Clantons.

The American male has increasingly given up his responsibilities to the police, unions and politicians.
He regards these forces as necessary evils and gives his off-TV hours up to their direction.
In short, most Americans have turned into gutless, daydreaming sheep

That's why, when you urge them to act toward their own survival, they give you the brushoff.
They won't be awakened.
They will leave their protection to overworked, thinly spread cops.
Their jobs, which they do so poorly now, are secured by corrupt labor union officials, more interested in pension funds than production.
They will gladly leave their political responsibilities up to the most personable political hack on the tube,
After all, they seem to think, if conditions get worse under their political hero, they can always change the channel.
But, they can't.
At least, not for long.

Kurt Saxon thought civilization would have collapsed by now.
He spent the majority of his life collecting knowledge of home based business.
His goal was for all his readers to survive at a more comfortable level than those that were less provident.

He knew the importance of communicating at a level folks could understand.
Most of what he has compiled for our benefit can be easily understood by everybody.

He also includes a subtle sense of humor.

You can find the majority of his life's work here.

Hear him read his stories.

---

Posts with rewards set to burn only burn the author's portion of the rewards. Curators still get paid.

IF you think this content should be eligible for rewards from the content rewarding pool, please express your discontent in this discord:

https://discord.gg/q3RJXrPk3N