Every time I go to the gym,* I figure I’ll treat myself with some TV. I’m going to listen to TV news. Exciting. World-spanning. I can catch up** on my pop-culture deficit during my 20 minutes of exercise (which resembles PT more than exercise, but hey).
And then I turn on the dreck. I start with Fox (why not?). Fox and Friends had on one Bush daughter and the Bush mom (not to be confused with the real Barbara Bush, who would never read, let alone write, a children’s book on Texas, or rather American clichés for the youngest minds to consume).
Switch that off. Let’s go to those supposedly liberal cable shows that big media and the G.O.P. are always whining about. It’s even worse. Mom and Pop are arguing. Plus Pop puts down Mom: He’s the intelligent one in the family, after all, who gets to reverse poor Mom — who has to keep saying to her supposed co-host, “No, you’re wrong” (or something to that effect).
Well, that’s when I gotta end. My PT, after all, works only in 20-minute increments, and at least I put in my 7 minutes learning why everyone — populists on the right and the left — is so gosh-dang-it angry — no, enraged. Let’s hope my PT recovery is better than the Democrats’. The Republicans, naturally, did it to themselves, and I’d listen to more backstabbing and whining if I just had the patience to finish.
#
* for PT, now exciting, energizing, strengthening . . . just 2 decades of recovery from self-induced PC compulsion
** TV was banned in our house when I was growing up, unlike my cousins. We had a working television but we couldn’t watch until we hit the junior-high ostracization years, when I accidentally revealed (to my horror) my ignorance by responding “Who?” to a mention of Keith Partridge of The Partridge Family. That was the last time I unwillingly hid under a pop-culture rock.
Ruth Frick O'Brien 