Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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What's the matter with ourmodern, technologically based society anyway? Why isn't it more satisfying? Why do so many of us now feel that some vague something hounds us and diminishes us and makes us into something less than we should be? Most specifically of all, do we really use television-and so many other "benefits" and "tools" of our technological age-or does Jerry Mender (see photo) speaks the unspeakable and asks the unaskable in a remarkable new book that is being an completely serialized in this magazine. This is the sixth installment in the series.

From Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mender, copyright© 1977 by the author. Reprinted with the permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc.Available in paperback for $4.95 from any good bookstore or for $4.95 plus 95¢ shipping and handling from Mother's Bookshelf, P.O. Box 70, Hendersonville, North Carolina 28739.

ARGUMENT THREE: EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE HUMAN BEING (CONCLUDED)

Television technology produces neurophysiological responses in the people who watch it. It may create illness, it certainly produces confusion and submission to external imagery. Taken together, the effects amount to conditioning for autocratic control.

THE REPLACEMENT OF HUMAN IMAGES BY TELEVISION

Television is the most important single source of images in the world today. If people are ingesting television images at the rate of four hours a day, then it is clear that whatever uses people have for the images they carry in their heads, television is now the source.

When you are watching television all categories of your own image-making capacities go dormant, submerged in the television image. TV effectively intervenes between you and your personal images, substituting itself.

When you are watching TV, you are not daydreaming, or reading, or looking out the window at the world. You have opened your mind, and someone else's daydreams have entered. The images come from distant places you have never been, depict events you can never experience, and are sent by people you don't know and have never met. Your mind is the screen for their microwave pictures. Once their images are inside you, they imprint upon your memory. They become yours. What's more, the images remain in you permanently. I can easily prove this to you.

Please bring to mind any of the following: John F. Kennedy, Milton Berle, Howdy Doody, the Bionic Man, Captain Kangaroo, Archie Bunker, Johnny Carson, Captain Kirk, Henry Kissinger.

Did any of these images appear in your mind? Were you able to make a picture of them in your head? If so, that is proof that once they have entered your brain they remain in there. They live in there together with all the memories of your life. Yet you don't know these people. And many of them are fictional characters.

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