I guess I’m coming to think of not watching TV as a form of mental vegetarianism. It was a slow move for me, especially because watching TV helped me get through the tedium of sitting down for half an hour to an hour three times a day and feeding my special needs daughter. I wanted something to offset the discomfort and binding nature of the task.

Since we unplugged, our household is much happier now, less irritable, more hopeful. We breathe easier and take greater pleasure in the view, just as we do after a storm clears out the haze that forms over the Four Corners region during a high pressure spell.

Doesn’t somethings being bereft of meaning itself mean something? The question is, What?

This post is another poke at the nature of exploitational language, how widespread “narrative take” is in the rhetorical stances we establish, the approach to being in the world we set up, lock-kneed. For environmental conditions to improve, language must first improve; elsewise all legislation, policy, discussion will only enable on one level or another further exploitation, just in another guise of “public good.”

Of course, merely dressing in what to all appearances seems to be better language is not taking a better stance. The human qualities that give rise to better human language must likewise emerge. It’s a spiritual dance, the rising of awareness and the rising of language.

Your argument regarding tv is a nice clarification of ideas that I found in McLuhan and Postman but have grown fuzzy over time. Television, as a whole, is bereft of meaning (though I do see promising signs) and ultimately media less constrained by time offer the most opportunities for significant thought.