WJFB BITES THE DUST AND THE DISH MAY BE KING
By
Jimmy Joe Meeker
First Published in The Wilson County Advocate, Vol. 3, No. 25, ©June 22, 1993 by Donald W. Gillette
Television is much more grotesque than anything else you can think of. Most of us see it as some sort of torturous and trite money pipeline that runs through the veins of the news business…a never-ending muddy ditch where bandits and whores run wild and decent people die like cattle for no good reason at all.
For the most part, they're disgusting little animals with deformed brains and no heartbeat. Every once in a while, they cough up a token human being like Ed Bradley or Bill Moyers…and maybe others like Stone Phillips on ABC or that stark raving lunatic Dr. Gene Scott, who used to broadcast like an insomniac vampire from some hell hole in California…
But these people are only the exception that proves the rule. Mainly in the television business, we're dealing with an unbelievably base world, a living, breathing web of treachery, greed, and foulness, which is also the biggest business around and almost impossible to ignore. You can never escape television. It's everywhere. The hog is in the tunnel.
I was reminded of all these things when I finally got back home after a week in the spooky confines of an airless cubicle at the New Orleans Airport Hotel to find the TV business working overtime at Lebanon Cablevision.
It was around 8 o'clock at night and the sky was filled with dark thunderclouds when I pulled up to the mailbox. The first thing that hit my eye when I tossed the junk in the front seat was an article in another local paper about Lebanon Cablevision dropping WJFB from its lineup due to some utterly fantastic ruling from the FCC or the Senate or some other pack of slobbering idiots so far removed from Wilson County that we might as well be living on Jupiter. I read the article by the interior light before I pulled up to the house. The Mazda was almost hidden from sight by the impending storm and the photosensors on the porch light were either on the fritz or the power had gone out. There was no sign of the truck which meant that Angelique had probably gone off to Wisconsin with the Nazis.
Years ago, I made the conscious decision to keep my place looking like an abandoned sawmill--which has worked out well for the disciplining of trespassers, but it is not a natural setting for massive, high-tech machinery…
So it was a serious shock when I glanced over at my neighbor's yard only to see a huge white saucer that appeared suspended in midair and tilted up at the sky like a NASA receptor. It was a satellite dish and it was the tallest thing in the immediate vicinity.
Damn, I thought, that thing must have cost a fortune. I looked at it in amazement for about ten minutes and then went inside, collapsed on the couch, and slept like an animal for two days.
What finally woke me up was the miserable growl of my neighbor's lawnmower so I decided to get the story on the dish.
I am, after all, the media critic for The Wilson County Advocate, and television falls into that category. But why, when Cablevision and a couple of movie channels only cost me 48 bucks a month would my neighbor buy a dish? With 32 channels to choose from I was hesitant to even get the cable. I was seriously worried about too much input, which is a very real problem with these things…but now my neighbor had installed a whole galaxy of wires and motors and screens and stainless steel gadgets with red lights and green lights and baffling digital readouts to compute things like spatial polarity and uplink angle from London in order to access something like 300 channels. Watching television could become a full-time job when you can scan 300 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching "Debbie Does Dallas" into the VCR if the rest of the world seems dull.
Anyway, I went outside and asked him about it.
"In 25 months," he said, "that 48 bucks you send to Lebanon Cablevision would buy one of these babies and you'd own it free and clear."
"So you're talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars and I can watch any channel in the universe?
"Not quite," he said. "There's one more thing--the descrambler. It'll run you about $500, plus at least $100 a month for the rest of your natural life."
"That's ridiculous," I said. "How can they charge me for signals I pick out of the sky?"
"It's easy," he answered. "They scramble all of their signals and you need a special decoding machine to see anything that matters. The channels will cost you $12.95 a month each and you'll want at least 10 or maybe 30 or 40 for a man with a job like yours."
"What are you saying?" I asked. "A thousand dollars for a dish and I couldn't use it until I dropped another grand a year?"
"Of course not. There's a whole raft of things that you'll be able to get--the 700 Club, the Home Shopping Network," he said as he smiled like a weasel. "Also Jimmy Swaggart and wrestling specials."
"No thanks," I told him as I walked away. "I've got enough problems. Besides, the wolves are at the door…the last thing I need is something else mechanical."
Later that night my friend Randolph stopped by to drink whiskey and bitch about life in general.
"Did you notice that dish next door?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, "magnificent."
"You're mad," I answered. "That thing is going to cost him a million dollars before he dies."
Randolph gulped down the rest of his drink. "True, but now he'll never have to leave the house."
I thought about that for a minute. Randolph was right. It was true. If my neighbor could find someone to deliver groceries to him, he'd never have to set food outside his house again for anything. Every piece of information he'd ever need would be piped in through that grotesque maze of wires and conduit.
"Of course," Randolph continued, "he'll go stark raving screwy knowing everything that's going on in the world including the cost of a cubic zirconium ring… I think you should get one."
I smacked him on the side of the head with a rolled-up wet towel stolen from the Airport Motel. It would have killed a lesser man, but Randolph was still cackling as he stumbled down the driveway. "That's what you need," he screamed, "something to keep you in the house."
And so I decided right then and there to keep the cable. But I'm going to drop the movie channels and demand that the FCC allow Lebanon Cablevision to broadcast WJFB so I can watch the Lebanon City Council when the urge for doom strikes me.
No one here gets out alive.
XXX