Thank you for this excellent piece. So, so true.

I have been television-less for decades and regularly get up on my soapbox to rail against that monstrous machine of distraction and distortion.

I wrote a piece about the Tube about three years ago ("The Submission Will Be Televised") and began it with a quote from Thomas Pynchon, one of my very favorite novelists.

To me it exposes the damage that box did to the idealism of the 1960s.

“Whole problem ‘th you folks’ generation . . . nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, the whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap.”

— Thomas Pynchon (Vineland)