I spent the weekend decomposing in my easy chair. The Decades network had a marathon of the Beverly Hilbillies and I dutifully watched most of it (xcept when I was sleeping.) I fear my posterior was starting to sprout roots...

I just needed some time off.

You know, back then they made one episode per week, with the only breaks being in the summer. This marathon started on Friday and went until six a.m. this morning. Imagine trying to run such a marathon with any popular show today; nowadays you are lucky if you get 15 episodes in a season, and those are usually only fifteen minutes, as opposed to the nearly 25 minutes you got in the old days. Television is mostly commercials these days.

When I was young we got cable t.v., the first in our neighborhood which made us the first in the city (just about, anyway.) My parents were familiar with cable from Colorado, where you have no reception. Well, where we lived we had no reception. We had a big rooftop antenna but it often failed, usually during a storm and my father would dutifully climb a ladder onto the roof and adjust it, often during lightning storms.

So when cable became available we snatched it up - it only cost $12 a month, and that included two premium movie channels (HBO and Cinemax) as well as a boatload of others (ESPN, MTV, WGN, WTBN, etc. etc.) and except for the commercial channels which we got there were no commercials. I mean, you were paying for it anyway, right?

But little by little the cable networks began slipping commercials in and the public kept buying the product, so they slipped more and more in.

And while there are not as many commercials as on commercial television, there are far, far too many.

And also now with streaming the commercial channels have become little more than commercials with shows squeezed in to get you to watch. Also, they get you hooked with maybe a season of a show then move to streaming so you have to pay.

It really is a horrible disgrace. We have become a nation of nothing but greed and commercial manipulation.

I have 70 channels on my antenna t.v., but of them at least half are infomercial channels, without any real programming.

I can't imagine how we got to this point, but the public has allowed it to happen. Back in the old days they would have turned the idiot box off. Now they actually pay to be the pigeons of Madison Avenue.

It's the slowly boiled frog syndrome. They just kept turning up the heat and we never noticed we were being turned into slaves to commerce.

It's what happens when you gut the moral and spiritual heart out of a nation. It becomes soulless and wealth and pleasure become the only reason for existing. Then nothing seems to matter except your ease and pleasure. It's why America has accepted so much of what we've  seen over the last few years/decades. Nobody wants to be bothered with, say, demanding proper education for children, or insisting on controlling the border. No rocking the boat!

At any rate, watching old television shows illustrates how much things have changed. In more ways than one.

Still, I enjoyed watching the Hillbillies. I'm not into country humor by and large, but the Hillbilles were in a class by themselves.

BTW I once heard the producer of the show say he HATED it!  He said he put his head on his desk and cried when he first saw the original proposal; he was going to have to do it because it was going to be a huge success but it was the last thing he wanted!

It may have been a corny premise, but it sure was funny.

The main theme was the pretensions of the well-to-do and the money grubbing classes, juxtaposed with the simple virtues of the hill folk, who were naive and innocent and yet who were much happier. Now I am not a person to condemn wealth and if you seek after it more power to you!  But it is clear there the Bible had it right "the love of money is the root of all evil" and it is the very problem we face in our modern world. Not content with the wealth they have the Ruling Class seeks more and more, and at the expense of the working class peoples. And the very hypocrisy illustrated in TBH is the same that we see in the Harvard educated insider classes. The Beverly Hillbillies is as fresh and pertinent today as it was at the time it was made - perhaps more so. We now live in a whole world of pretentious busybody blue bloods trying to run our lives.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:53 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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