Iggy was wrong.

TV isn’t an eye. It’s another portion of the anatomy.

Two years ago, I stopped watching television. I eliminated it from my daily activities because I found it crippled my sensory perceptions of reality and illusion. It wasted my time, the only time I’ve got.

Back then I had a hunch that more and more people were watching less land less TV. I explained my hunch to a famous TV personality I was then working with on a project. He tilted his head, looked at line over the glasses he never wears on TV, and said, “Richard, for such-a smart boy, you sure can say some stupid things. People will never stop watching television.”

I really think less people are watching TV than ever before. I’m backed up in this* opinion by some scattered newspaper reports td that effect, but I realize that until the last TV set is unplugged no one in the media will actually admit it’s so. There’s one very good reason for this—TV’s income is based on advertising* and its advertising rates are based on how many people it reaches.

Back in the 1950’s when I was being brought up on sugar and Howdy Doody, FCC exec Newton Minow explained that TV was a “vast wasteland”. It still is. Next to corporateand political irresponsibility, TV is the single most debilitating element ir^our culture. And don’t tell me that, yeah, most of the stuff on TV is junk, but there are some good shows. As we used to say back in Connecticut, the only good politician is a dead one. The same goes for TV.

As a^media child, I’ve had the chance to manipulate the media during a period of intense , media awareness. I’ve been syndicated in newspapers, had radio shows, produced records, created TV for the network, and let me tell you, I don’t believe a word of it.

At the time I stopped watching TV, I unwired Ynyself completely and returned to first-person fantasy for both myself and the spectators. Being by. nature and profession pretty well informed as to the nature of illusion, I’ve discovered that TV is a lousy illusion and that people who watch TV are easier to fool than aborigines out of the bush.

TV is a box, a trick box, that has a sheet of glass on one side. It lights up behind the g|ass and shows views of various places. Not a bad trick, but a card trick none the less. And how many card tricks can you watch before you get a headache? Frankly, I think that TV has had its day, and fortunately the adage “nothing lasts forever” is presently being applied to TV.

The biggest single fault of TV is that it’s not entertaining. In fact, most TV watchers have np idea how entertaining real entertainment can be. Personally, I stopped watching because I got very tired of watching men fighting and girls dancing under the guise of entertainment. Violence and soapsuds don’t satisfy me. Entertainment is illusion and TV is nothing more than a cheap substitute for real illusion. TV is more of a cheat than paying to get into the freak show at a small-time carnival. The payoff is dissatisfying. Real entertainment isn’t like that, unless, of course, you’ve watched so much TV that you think Chorus Line and Beatlemania are entertainment. ,

TV seems to leave nothing to the imagination, although I’d say that metaphysically ibis incapable of even touching the imagination. But in entertainment, the imagination is the humanelement that is necessary for the illusion. That’s why radio, movies, books, and live theater work so much better than TV as illusion and as entertainment. *

The TV set itself is not at fault. I use my TV set from time to time, to watch first run movies on Home Box Office, to play video tapes, and let’s see, that’s about it. But when it comes to using my TV set for its intended purpose, well, you’ve got to be kidding.

Only recently haye I started to admit that I don’t watch TV anymore. I find people are threatened by my not watching TV. They get all ruffled and hiss at me. They don’t want to know about someone who’s going through life without any idea what Mork and Mindy look like. And believe me, I have no idea. Most of the time I just nod and say that’s nice, because I don’t like to upset people in their narrow-mindedness, because they get nasty and violent as they get defensive. Personally I don’t give a shit who watches TV, as long as I don’t’ have to.

But in my passive resistance to the ultimate, wired-up experience (and I did title this column “rewire yourself’ many years ago), I dp have some strong political opinions about TV as media. TV does manipulate the people who watch it. It does make them think they know something when they know nothing, or less than nothing* And in certain forms, TV is outright hateful. This hatefulness centers specifically around TV news, which is the most corrupt of all television, more corrupt than Donny Osmond’s smile. The entire concept that there has to be thirty minutes of news'every day is quite ridiculous when you think about it. Some days there’s no news and thank God for that. Also hateful is the legalized bullshit of lemon flavored (but no actual lemons involved) TV commercials. Politicians, corporate reports, and TV commercials practice a level of jingoistic deception that is harmful to your mental health if you allow yourself to be exposed to it. I don’t. I just pay my taxes and secretly hope for the day when nobody turns on their TV set, or shows up to vote.

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Well, I guess this pretty much puts me out of the closet on this one. But I had to say it. TV is a depressant, it’s anti-social, and ultimately it’s the very definition of meaninglessness. Will it go away because I choose to ignore it? It has for me, already. I’m"born again, and if I had to do it over, I’d have skipped it from the beginning, Buffalo Bob and Miss Francis notwithstanding. The truth is, all I ever got from TV is cavities.