The Cathode Beelzebub

Something that I heard on a radio program a while back has been troubling me.

I was listening to a program about "remote viewing" on www.artbell.com. Remote viewing is a type of clairvoyance wherein the practitioner attempts to concentrate on an unseen "target" or subject of interest which is not visible to the practitioner. Such a technique has been utilized by the military and police departments, apparently, for many years; aiding in locating missing persons and objects. It is a way of "seeing"without seeing, if that makes any sense, and assuming you believe such a thing is even possible.

The host that night asked the remote viewer if anyone had ever tried to use this technique to "find" the concept of the devil. I found this was a very interesting question, but the answer that was given was a bit chilling. The closest thing that anyone could come to an answer, the man said, was television.

Whoa. Television? I was stunned. All those hundreds of hours I had spent as a kid watching "Gilligan's Island" and "The Munsters" probably weren't what anyone would term "quality time", but I'd like to think it fell well short of being "evil".

Then I thought about it. It was possible, I supposed, to associate evil with television based on the way TV had been used through the decades to further evil purposes; disinformation, outright slander and the targeting of children to sell all manner of unhealthy, destructive products, and the way TV had sort of hijacked the culture by becoming the touchstone by which we measured legitimacy and relevance (heretofore known as "coolness"). You had to be thin, young, with a a great body and a Nordic appearance in order to be taken seriously as a human being. You had to wear the right clothes, drive the right car and live in the right neighborhood. And this was not just in the commercials. The message pervaded the network programming as well. The networks relied increasingly as sex and violence to sell their shows, and thereby, their advertising products. While I have and do defend television as a place where all sorts of programming occurs, it's hard to deny that this trend of appealing to the lowest common denominator has become more and more prevalent as the years have gone by. Now we even have supposed "reality" shows that generally exist to either humiliate the "real people" on them or pit them against each other and encourage them to be dishonest and unscrupuluous in order to win some perspective prize. I don't watch much of this type of programming, as it serves only to make me ashamed to be a human being.

But, is it fair to call television "evil"? Isn't there a lot of educational and beneficial programming content out there? Sure, the usual suspects pop up when mentioning education on TV; PBS, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, the History Channel. You don't HAVE to watch "Fear Factor" and "Desperate Housewives". No one forces you to tune out "The McNeil/Lehrer Report" in favor of "The Man Show". That's YOUR choice, and we can hardly blame television for your weakness of character. Other mediums give you largely the same aesthetic options. "The New York Times" is right beside "The National Enquirer", just as Mozart is probably in the same store as Nelly. The choice is truly yours, and it's not fair to indict an entire medium on the basis of its more base contributions.

And that's why I always shy away from calling any "thing", in and of itself, evil. In the final analysis, "it"is just a thing, devoid of any predetermined (or unchangeable) moral value. I can always recall a "Superfriends" episode from my childhood that dealt with a box that was supposed to be "totally evil". This box was sought after by the Legion of Doom to use against the Superfriends, but Superman took it and used it for "good", which of course led to a little speech about how nothing is purely good or evil, that it's only the application of things that is good or bad. Sure, it's a simplistic message from a juvenile source, but the underlying philosophy is borne out from our own experience. Is there anything, that in and of itself, is evil? Money can be used to help the poor or exploit them. Guns can be used to protect or to kill. Drugs are able to cure and alternately, addict and destroy. In the end, it's all us and our ability to use our judgement when applying these instruments that nature or invention have provided to us.


Then again, maybe the remote viewer didn't actually "see" television, but perhaps just a monitor. Maybe what they really saw was a computer.

Oh dear, here we go again...