Jenkinson: teevee is hell

Few deny that commercial television is merely a vehicle to sell crap to stupid Americans.

Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt Center scholar at Dickinson State University, Distinguished Scholar of the Humanities at Bismarck State College and director of the Dakota Institute. His radio show, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, airs Sundays at noon Mountain Time on KRCC, Radio Colorado College. According to publicradiofan.com seventeen broadcasts of the program are available weekly.

In his column appearing in the Bismarck Tribune he counts the ways how souls are damaged by the lower nine-tenths of commercial teevee programming:

1. The boundless fixation on sex, sexual innuendo, and sex divorced from the sacrament of commitment and respect. 2. Vulgarity, incivility, the routine use of ugly, demeaning and aggressive language that would literally have been outlawed on public airways 15 years ago. 3. The objectification of women and the radical sexualization of the nation’s daughters, who are being hothoused in popular culture into a semi-smutty “womanhood” long before the first onset of puberty. 4. An almost unlimited pop cultural fascination with graphic violence, including gun violence. 5. An unrelenting reductionism of ideas, art, aesthetics, issues, subtleties and complex situations into the lowest of the lowest common denominator. 6. Unrestrained and unrelieved materialism. Television is capitalism’s ultimate expression of its core values. 7. The collapse of the art of genuine conversation and mutually respectful argument. 8. And, of course, every hour we spend watching “The Steve Wilkos Show” or “Family Guy” is an hour we are not reading a book, taking a walk, playing the ukulele, baking bread, having a thoughtful conversation or gazing at the stars.

As the Republicans self-immolate they are trying to destroy one of the last chances for salvation: public broadcasting.

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