Turn on, tune in? Drop Dead!
Way Back When…
The original mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” as coined by Dr. Timothy Leary wound up forever associated with the hedonistic, self-absorbed, so-called counter-culture of 60’s Hippiedom (and all that still continues to shuffle down the same shambolic trail).
You might consider it a call to arms or a rallying cry, except that would imply activity and commitment. Qualities not commonly associated with wastrels and dropouts.
Unfortunately for Dr. Leary, this wasn’t at all what he intended. The true meaning, he later claimed, was:
- Turn on - activate yourself, use your mind and body;
- Tune in - engage with the world around you;
- Drop out - leave behind that which does you no good and seek instead fulfilment and happiness.
Seen afresh through the author’s eyes its clear that it is after all a highly laudable call to action - to sit up, look about you and help fix a broken world. Certainly not an excuse to light another joint and blame evil capital imperialists for the state of pop music post 1973.
He also came up with “think for yourself and question authority” which has to rank among the hot contenders for best single piece of advice, ever. Yet poor old Timothy will always be remembered as the vacuous Hippy he never was.
Good old unintended consequences, the constant companion of all who would change the world and bedrock of so much irony.
Fast forward
Ah well, that was the 60’s. Peace and love and sod-all else. Cut to the present day and… eek! The mantra’s back! Only this time it’s no metaphor, but literally, turn on the TV, tune in to the drivel, drop out of your own life.
Welcome to a parallel universe of scripted trivia revolving around fictional characters and their shallow existence. What you might call deeply superficial; scratch the surface and you’ll cause catastrophic structural failure.
Turn on, tune in, drop out. What a terrible thing to do your own brief moment of being you. To dribble it away, day by day, year after year, following each tedious detail of the frivolous and mundane antics of people barely discernable from cartoon caricatures.
How many gravestones must be inscribed “Here lies… did little, knew less, unless you count an encyclopaedic knowledge of Brian and Tracey, including that time he slept with her sister Julie whose husband was in prison (for sheep molesting) where he turned to Zoroastrianism and started an affair with his cell-mate Wayne who used to be a woman called Charmaine before all the trouble started next door…”?
In his novel “Brave New World” Aldous Huxley envisioned a widely used drug called Soma the purpose of which was to maintain a background numbness and suppress individuality, all the better to control society. Change the word Soma to Soap and “come on down Aldous, tonight’s prize for being spot on the money is yours!”
Still, its not all Soap and “reality TV” (how they must have laughed when someone dreamt that up - no writing, acting, production costs, just lift vain imbeciles off the street and document their obvious lack of talent, charm or wit).
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Not at all. There’s News and Current Affairs.
Oh sure there is. Get past the “human interest” filter (cut to nuclear missile operator who has inadvertently levelled Boston, “How did you feel when you pressed the wrong button? What do you think your wife will say when you get home?”) and you might find some crumbs of news content.
What few facts remain though will have been carefully selected and framed to present a very particular point of view. This might entail casually ignoring the commonplace (accidental death while out fishing is surprisingly frequent but I’ve never once seen it reported, have you?) in favour of the rare but spectacular (man skewered on flag pole after parachute eaten by killer moths released from sinister experimental lab, pregnant widow tells sky-diving correspondent how she feels).
Or it might rely on loaded language, so instead of “President Bush flies to Geneva for G8 meeting” we get “Deeply unpopular President Bush forced to fly to Geneva for crisis talks”. Repeat regularly and viewers start to adopt these assumptions as their own beliefs. Its not new, the Nazis were especially fond of this technique and I rather doubt they invented it.
Then there’s the ultimate cheapskate brainless fallback when they can’t even manage the usual half-arsed attempt at stringing together a few simple words to describe what passes for current affairs (some D-List “celebrity” divorce, for example). Yes, we’re talking about inviting the very numbskulls who view this rubbish to contribute their own spectacularly uninformed opinions: “Have YOU been a victim of ‘text messaging death‘? Text in and let us know how you feel.”
But if you think Television News plays fast and loose with the facts to fit their own agendas, its nothing compared to the wholesale cut-n-paste approach of Current Affairs programming. Assembling information, or more often just opinion dressed up as information, to support a preordained version of reality.
By way of an example that has lodged in my memory, the BBC some while back had to issue a fairly grovelling apology for editing footage of the Queen of England so as to give a deliberately false impression she had thrown the Monarch of All Tantrums.
Tellingly, the story wasn’t that they pulled this stunt - they do that as a matter of routine - it was centered on the fact that the Queen demanded and actually received a public apology.
In a world with unprecedented access to information and other people, watching TV is like being on the wrong end of a firehose connected to the thoughts of The Creature From The Planet Cretin.
Mass communication as a means to drench as many people as possible with the same anodyne tripe and political dogma.
Maybe it’s just me, but turn on and tune in? Drop dead!