This afternoon I was reading from "The Best American Essay 2006" although I was supposed to be reading for another class. You know how tempting essays can be though :) And I found a fantastic quote about media by Poe Ballentine in his essay "501 Minutes to Christ". The protagonist is watching TV here goes:
"One night, without warning, H. Ross Perot's earnest nasal rant about the arrogant complacency of the American people triggers the realization of my own arrogant complacency, and self-reproach suddenly gurgles up to my eyelids like storm water in a backed-up sewer. I think to myself: I'm thirty-six years old and rotting in front of a television set. The electrons that bomb that cathode-ray tube are crumbling the cartilage of my soul, eating away my youth and the children in my loins. I don't need to see another riot, or plane crash, or evil twin, or clever light-beer commercial, or guy pointing a gun at me, or steroid millionaire swatting a home run. I snap off the tube, and all those emotions that have been sluicing into my veins, all the opinions and ideas I have mistaken for my own, zip dizzily up into the atmosphere, and I am suddenly a man alone on a fold-out couch in the empty darkness of an add-on room."
That last part especially is what motivated me to climb back up to the top floor for this book so I could type it up. The first is admittedly melodramatic, but I liked the phrase that the ideas and emotions from the TV were actually not his own, and when the source was switched off, they fizzled away and he was left empty.
"One night, without warning, H. Ross Perot's earnest nasal rant about the arrogant complacency of the American people triggers the realization of my own arrogant complacency, and self-reproach suddenly gurgles up to my eyelids like storm water in a backed-up sewer. I think to myself: I'm thirty-six years old and rotting in front of a television set. The electrons that bomb that cathode-ray tube are crumbling the cartilage of my soul, eating away my youth and the children in my loins. I don't need to see another riot, or plane crash, or evil twin, or clever light-beer commercial, or guy pointing a gun at me, or steroid millionaire swatting a home run. I snap off the tube, and all those emotions that have been sluicing into my veins, all the opinions and ideas I have mistaken for my own, zip dizzily up into the atmosphere, and I am suddenly a man alone on a fold-out couch in the empty darkness of an add-on room."
That last part especially is what motivated me to climb back up to the top floor for this book so I could type it up. The first is admittedly melodramatic, but I liked the phrase that the ideas and emotions from the TV were actually not his own, and when the source was switched off, they fizzled away and he was left empty.
