Yeah, yeah, yeah. These vignettes, re-run three or four times an hour, aren’t enough to stop my work, for like many of us, I’m so numb to the future that is here and now that I don’t even mutter or guffaw anymore. I keep working, waiting patiently till enough programming choices are available on this $100 a month cable service that I can remote-click to something soothing, the 9 a.m. Dick Van Dyke Show and the TVLand lineup that follows.

So great, huh? So nurturing, so comforting to have our latchkey childhoods back with “The Brady Bunch,” “I Love Lucy…,” the shows that do that soft slapstick shuffle, the ones with those empty, facile guffaws in a can, giving us a sense of nothing mattering, nothing even existing outside our cocoon of the plump pastels of Bob Newhart and his cooing passivity and everyman stuttery shuddering; of the scratchy blacks and whites of “The Jackie Gleason Show” and his jiggly jousty rants buffered by the simpleton kindness of Ed Norton; of the deep purples and tangy bright greens of the engaging silly, serialized shows like Batman with its smooth and macho heroics of the dynamic duo ushered into action by the paternal caring cadence of the gentle Commissioner Gordon. Ahhhhh.

Like many in today’s speed culture, I have been swept up in the challenge to defy a law of physics that asserts two things cannot exist in the same place at the same time: I chuckle and type to Andy of Mayberry and that absurdly adorable Opie that no kid has yet out-cuted—though Cosby’s Raven Symoné (playing little Olivia) comes

close—and whiz through a chapter during the foppy floppy gesturing of Derwood during one of his whacky witch wife’s spells, click away revising, and am about six pages in. I’ve let go of the peripheral grip of TV as the only thing of focus and am into my work. I mean into it. As if I had shrunk to the size of a stick figure drawing and climbed into the Microsoft Word document, moving the words like building blocks, stacking the appositives, kicking away the superfluous punctuation. I’m getting excited. My breathing picks up, my blood pumps. I am thumping away, thumping, thumping, chathumping, chathumping, chathump chathump chathumpchathumpchathum. My. God. What. Is. This. Ungodly. Feeling…? Son of a…it’s on TV!

I am hyperventilating faster than my fast heart is palpitating because of a frickenfracken commercial! So with a “Shut the…” rant at the Sony, I hit that mute button as if it were a nuclear disarmament switch. And for this new strain of virulent TV advertising, as far as I’m concerned, it is. Hitting the mute is as close as I can come to retrieving the peace that is now threatened, is as best as I can do to slow down the hurtling speeds at which we are driving and being driven into a world of product product product, into a culture that has a pathogenic imperative to outrun, outdo, outsell that from which it has evolved.

Commercials in general are obnoxious. They assume our insipid desperation, they presume our vulnerability, they deny our capacity for ratiocination. Their makers—advertising agencies–multi-mill/bill/zillion dollar companies and corporations–depend upon our relaxing of conscious and critical thought to convince and seduce us—in our unguarded moments—to give up our money.

They use, as many of us might have learned from Marshall McCluhan, Vance Packard, and our critical thinking class professors, studied techniques and strategies of the commercial industry to get us to join the pod people, to fork over the cash without so much as a resisting clearing of the throat….

Continued in Part Two

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