Twice a month I play a ruthless game of scrabble with my Aunt and my Mother in their living room, network TV blaring as it does for the 18 hours a day my Aunt is awake. Scrabble brawls were previous conducted on Sundays, but have now been moved to weekdays, since it was considered unholy, that on the Lord’s Day, a player going by the moniker “The Dark Lord of Diction” was forever victorious.

Over the past two months I have been astounded by the acceptance of things that are said on this single network, and that even my younger sister seems to agree with the various pronouncements when she stops by for lunch.

First comes the local network news at noon with its easily detected obfuscation, thinly veiled lies, presented by the typical Baltimore News crew, in which white men are never permitted the anchor chair, but relegated to sports and weather. I have noted that whoever produces these shows is obsessed with matching tall, blonde, white anchor women with portly black fellows. This “news” segment is the only sane thing about the afternoon broadcast.

Next comes a soap opera, which is refreshingly less predictable than the news cast, in which the drama of being a rich American is recycled endlessly.

Next is an hour long program featuring a good looking and intelligent Chinese babe—who I would gladly chain to my bed post after slaughtering her menfolk—a WNBA bimbo who is almost tolerable, two homely female Caucasian runts—one with a British accent—and a fat, loud, rude and violent black woman, that might pass as a comedian on some barbarian planet wherein Tommy Sotomayor is marooned and enslaved by its queen. Thankfully the looker runs the thing. The entire program is very consensus oriented and celebrity conscious, obsessed with beautiful people and useless things. I came away with the impression—after my first viewing—that the purpose of this show is to form electoral opinion in the mind of women and those classes of people who will typically be home during the normal work day.

Next is an hour long show hosted and named after a personable and reasonably intelligent black comedian. I like this guy, as it has always been easy for me to like funny black fellows with the knack for telling a good story. According to my mother he is a cross-over comedian/game show host. What disturbed me about the show is that this guy is sought out by people of all walks of life as a moralist. For instance, a white couple came to him for marriage counseling. The wife was a nice bimbo. The Husband—a successful, controlling insecure type—was counseled by this comedian that instead of taking his wife on vacations that focused on activities, like sailing, hiking, etc., he should take her to the best hotels, have her manicured, bathed and massaged, and treated like Cleopatra, generally, as the best food and drink available was consumed. Nice fellow though he may be, this comedian turned pop culture guru, strikes me as a pimple of materialism bursting forth on the feminist body politic, promoting imagery and superficial affluence like a midnight infomercial for a pyramid scheme.

Finally, in the last hour of this network purgatory, a slight, boyish imp of a dyke comes out on stage and is lauded as the savior of some bizarre strain of humanity, as if Joan of Arc has been reincarnated as a collectable gaming card with a specialty in sandwich making. This show was less intrusive in terms of opinion, but was all the more frightening for it, as everybody there all already seemed to believe in whatever this dyke believed in, clapping as avidly as Christians at a 700 Club rally.

I actually stopped in the middle of forming a word to observe, that this show, this worship of this seated dyke waiting for an old man—of the type that might have once been interviewed concerning his knowledge on some such show of the 1970s—to bring her coffee in a painfully fumbling manner while the crowd laughed as if it were high art, was where the other shows were aimed; that this dyke and her worshippers were the society that the other shows were designed to cultivate. I felt like an anthropologist that had just stumbled upon the reason for mass willful idiocy and moral degeneracy just as the world embraced the sorry results with eager applause, and the people that had overseen my upbringing in a very different world, according to a very different set of norms, idled away the hour oblivious that the world had utterly changed and had dragged them sleeping with it.

What remains most interesting to me, is that there is not, among these seven social gurus, a single representative of the class of people who make most of the money, most of the decisions, and fight all of the wars engaged in by this society. There is not a single white man present any place other than the soap opera and the weather report. This smacks of the formation of a slave mentality, like chattel singing to help forget their plight while the master breeds more of them.

I do not recall the names of the criminals on these shows, only the face of the Asian woman who should be fitting my bed sheets in something that does not fit, so have hopefully avoided bringing down the wrath of The God of Things upon this humble site for impugning his priesthood.