Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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One of the reasons for my father's success during hard times was World War II. He was beyond draft age and so was free to do a successful trade in servicing the manufacture of military uniforms. After the war, the business grew in new directions as the economy spurted forward into an era of rapid growth. Nonetheless, I decided his business wasn't for me.

I had planned something much flashier for myself, something with greater glamour. It was snobbery, I suppose. By then, when I thought about my "career"—always a hot topic around our house—certain images would fly through my mind. Since so many of the images were from the ads of the period, the world of advertising seemed appropriate. There was something about that life-style, those big cars, the great white yachts, the polished people on them and the life of leisure and pleasure: The Dream.

It wasn't so much that I was especially interested in wealth or that I ached to have all the goodies that were being shown in the ads of the 1940s and 1950s. I didn't want to own the cars and yachts so much as I wanted to be like the people who did. More, I wanted to help create those images, to be around models, artists, photographers and writers whom I imagined to be the sleek and sophisticated people.

Despite some early setbacks, such as that Park Avenue experience, by 1966 much of my dream was realized. By then I had already concluded a successful career as head of a theatrical publicity agency and joined a celebrated San Francisco ad agency, which became Freeman, Mander and Gossage.

We concentrated on so-called class clients. Triumph, Land Rover and Rover cars. Eagle shirts. Paul Masson wines. KLH audio equipment. Scientific American. Advent Corporation. Alvin Duskin dresses. Random House publishing.

Ours was the most elegant office in town. I was commuting coast to coast weekly, taking five-day vacations in Tahiti, eating only in French restaurants, jetting to Europe for a few days' skiing.

At some point, not very long into this new career, I began to realize a kind of hollowness in myself. I caught myself smiling pasty smiles. I noticed that despite all this I was not having a good time.

I think I hit an emotional bottom in 1968 while cruising through the Dalmatian Straits, observing rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky, and colors as bright as a desert.

Leaning on the deck rail, it struck me that there was a film between me and all of that. I could "see" the spectacular views. I knew they were spectacular. But the experience stopped at my eyes. I couldn't let it inside me. I felt nothing. Something had gone wrong with me. I remembered childhood moments when the mere sight of the sky or grass or trees would send waves of physical pleasure through me. Yet now on this deck, I felt dead. I had the impulse to repeat a phrase that was popular among friends of mine, "Nature is boring." What was terrifying even then was that I knew the problem was me, not nature. It wasn't that nature was boring. It was that nature had become irrelevant to me, absent from my life. Through mere lack of exposure and practice, I'd lost the ability to feel it, tune into it, or care about it. Life moved too fast for that now.

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