Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, Welcome Back Kotter and other broadcast TV classics bound us together as a culture in a way that cable TV and streaming services like YouTube, Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, and the rest, never can. It’s not just the content of these old shows, but the fact that we all watched them at the same night, at the same time.
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19 replies on “Culture Glue: How Broadcast TV Bound Us Together in a Way Cable and YouTube Never Can”
This phenomenon existed before TV, with radio. People tuned in for their favorite radios “shows”.
I wonder if that has a correlation to how united the nation was during WWII and up until the mid-60’s? I’ve never seen any kind of paper or study on this topic.
I know that after WWII and Korea men tended to be portrayed as harmless, lovable, funny buffoons on TV. Like Dick Van Dyke, Barney Fife and the unarmed but folk-wise Sheriff Andy Taylor. That was intentional. So many men went to war and so many men became killers and returned home that it had a broad social effect.
No one wanted to look the fact in the face that Dad or Grandpa was a killer, not even Dad or Grandpa. Everyone, including those who served in combat theaters, wanted to put that behind them. (Liza Schlesinger has a comedy bit about this and it’s quite funny if somewhat poignant to people like me. It’s called “Confirmed Kills” and I recommend it.)
I don’t blame them for that. It’s not a pleasant thing and it’s a lot to ask of a man. To never be able to even pretend he isn’t like the guy who left for Basic Training, just a little older now, is too much to pay for what that guy went through.
My uncle told me about when my Dad came home from Korea. They went deer hunting (something my Dad really loved) and were walking down the lane by the lake at my Grandparent’s farm. They accidentally jumped a rabbit and before the fact that it was a rabbit even registered my dad had shot it. My Dad didn’t say a word, just unloaded his gun and walked back to the house. It took Dad a long time before he wouldn’t snap shoot rabbits or anything else and he wasn’t safe until he got a handle on that. But NO ONE EVER talked about it to Dad. He needed to pretend he could get back to being the same guy who walked that lane before he went in the military. By pretending long enough and hard enough he was able to get at least a part of that guy back again.
… And he and I enjoyed many, many seasons of deer hunting together.
This is not a trivial thing. The reason I bring it up is that there may be some sort of thing at work socially that Bill has touched on in this video. It may have had a huge but largely ignored impact. There are other things, like I describe above, which are very real but not widely known.
To be fair, it’s hard to talk about “society” on an island where there is only one person. Without other people, we tend to go insane.
While with other people we tend to go crazy! 😉
My other personalities disagree. They know that I’m perfectly sane!
“Go” insane? I’ve been waiting here for you all for years.
When I first gave up the cable box, I celebrated. It had gotten expensive and there wasn’t much to watch on those 600 channels. I immediately went on a subscription spree. It didn’t take long to realize that for each subscription I had signed up for, there were one – maybe two – programs worth watching. The rest was just garbage. So I cancelled most of them and am now down to just a few, but even with those few I find that I’m mostly watching reruns of older shows and movies or just turn off the TV and do something more productive.
bill…permission to use ‘circle jerk theory’. dead on concept. excellent video. i’m sending it to my entire posse. some will listen, some won’t. so it goes.
I still don’t know who shot J.R. Lol. Having said that, the Marxists have sought to destroy the one thing that still united us in space and time and that’s professional sports. Something will take its place. Maybe an unwoke professional league or maybe we just all meet at the local ballfield and watch our kids play more connected to our neighbors. Maybe college sports will fill the breach on a national level. I don’t know other than to say America has had it with disunity and wokeness.
In the meantime, I’ll be happily watching reruns of the shows like Cheers and M.A.S.H. and Welcome Back Kotter that united us all as I channel my inner Sweathog.
As an aside, Mrs Ron and I have been watching some older shows, Cheers and Frasier for example. I thought to go back and revisit MASH. Holy cow I had forgotten how leftist that show was. After a few episodes I had to stop.
Yeah the politics of M.A.S.H. are a problem, but I still watch as I like the genuine concern they show for each other along with the humor which doesn’t constantly rely on insults and/or sexual innuendo. Same goes for Frasier, Cheers and a lot of shows back then.
Somewhere along the line the writers kept the “burns” and the zingers uttered out of frustration and oneupsmanship but lost the reconciliation, love and genuine friendship. From there, it was just a race to the bottom, and they now have been trying to replace real virtue with insincere virtue-signaling.
Just like music, they kept the same boring chord formula to get a reaction and autotuned the rest.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday. God bless!
Love that Bill said circle jerk.
I was looking for the link Bill mentioned!
I am guessing this is the one to which he was referring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG5inw9LHr0
Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry when he realized that he could only go so far with Have Gun Will Travel. I still like Palladin better than Capt Kirk.
I was talking to Ronette the other day, and she was ranting about the general stupidity of the people around her, even though they are all in college and some of them are “professors”. I chuckled and said it reminds me of one of my favorite truisms. To my great surprise, she quoted it back to me, saying that I first said it to her when she was in Jr HS. (She did listen before rolling her eyes!)
Picture a person that you know of “average” intelligence. (this will be a person not very bright when most people call up the image)
Then understand that by definition, half of the people are dumber than that person.
This doesn’t make it easier to put up with stupid people, but it does give you the insight that the reason someone did something dumb was likely not due to them hating you or being evil, it is much more likely the simple solution that they are just stupid.
ACTS quoted some famous people with enlightening things to say about simplicity. I will also leave 2 quotes; one from a (relatively) famous person, the other from my dad to me, in Jr HS.
Ignorance can be fixed, stupid is forever – Ron White
K.I.S.S. it! (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
I learned a long time ago from my dad—who never graduated high school but had loads of common sense—to be humble and grateful for what I have. He taught me never to look down upon people with less intelligence, and I find such humility to be a hallmark of the truly bright, Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell being two prime examples. It also distinguishes them from these stupid people who think they are bright—bright enough, in fact, to tell the rest of us what to do.
Recently I’ve commented online a number of times that I don’t mind their stupidity as long as it’s not really affecting me. I’ll put up with the person in line who, despite standing there for 10 minutes alongside me, never thought to get their stuff ready ahead of time to pay at the register. It’s a few minutes out of my day, and oftentimes I end up having a brief but pleasant conversation with someone else.
However, when their stupidity starts to interfere with not only my freedom but also the future of my children by their ignoring science, facts and truth in favor of slavery to tyranny while calling ME a liar and a cult member, I tend to get a little testy and drop the nice and polite demeanor.
I’m not mean, but I am direct without regard to how they feel after I take them down a peg or two. They are insecure arrogant nitwits who suspect but won’t admit to themselves that they’re not quite the cat’s meow they claim. They reside for the bulk of their professional existence among other insecure arrogant nitwits who suffer from the same malfunction.
Collectively, they seek to secure their manufactured positions of power (gifted people wouldn’t be caught dead in such an intellectually stifling environment) by regulating the rest of us. In the process, they wear their stupid degrees as a badge and make up lingo for the sake of sounding superior…lingo such as the word “space.” Not “field of study” or “target market” which would let the rest of us know what the hell they’re talking about, but “space.”
Ugh.
Then they use both this useless vocabulary and ever-specialized degrees (e.g. “underwater basket weaving for persons of color”—not “colored people” as that would be “racist” (eye roll)) to issue arguments from faux authority as if the rest of us couldn’t possibly understand their point of view.
At the same time, they insist that their actual superiors (who don’t really care about measures such as IQ) must have had some sort of advantage (Asperger’s comes to mind) or privilege. The thought that they themselves just might not be the bee’s knees never occurs to them.
One prime example is Wharton’s upcoming conference (or whatever they call it) on climate change. Do ya think there’s ONE DAMN SCIENTIST slated among the speakers?
Of course not.
They’re all finance this and social justice that, a collection of actual grifters shouting “orange man bad” and accusing Trump of grifting. Meanwhile, the Trump organization wrote checks back to the U.S. Treasury to ensure that they did not violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution by not making a thin dime from his status while in office.
By contrast, the Wharton climate change conference attendees collect paychecks while conning the American public with the globalist lie that climate change will end the earth if we don’t spend trillions upon trillions of dollars and change course within the next 9 years (or is it 8?).
So let me just say this. I, for one, am done with them, and I think I speak for most sane Americans who have realized that the Twitter mob is a tiny minority (the transgender supporters threatening to leave Netflix over Dave Chappelle’s last special was met with apathy of epic proportions).
When President Trump won in 2016, the Young Turks and all the other useful idiots proclaimed “the gloves are off” to a shrug and eye roll by the rest of us. Since then, we’ve put up with their tantrums and immature “resistance.” Now that they’ve shot their wad including stealing an election when it became abundantly clear that they couldn’t win legitimately and that the election steal has gradually revealed itself in various ways to most Americans, America is tired of pandering to these idiots, a group which includes the idiots who constantly blame race or the lies and cheating of others for their lack of success as they operate as the most egregious racists, liars and cheaters of all.
So the sleeping giant has been awakened. The Kraken has been released. The levers of power for the left are all spent. Their wells of oppression have run dry. They have nowhere else to go.
Look for their crazy to increase exponentially as they go more and more insane unwilling to accept reality.
At this point, for the genuinely gifted, the gloves are truly off as perfectly justified by the left taking the first swing. Get ready for a true reckoning and a drive back toward meritocracy. America is primed and ready for it. We can’t wait to regain our lives.
For those watching closely, there are cracks in the dam. Here is one related to the serious. Associate Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago was supposed to give a talk on climate change at M.I.T. Then M.I.T. caved to the social justice warriors and canceled the talk as Assoc. Prof. Abbot had dared to endorse meritocracy, fairness and equality in place of Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion.
Well wouldn’t you know it? We aren’t having it any more.
After the cancellation by M.I.T. and significant backlash, Princeton offered him a slot to give the same talk on climate change, and the support continues to roll in. Even M.I.T. sheepishly admitted their error and scheduled him for another smaller lecture on his own work.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/10/14/bret-stephens-on-dorian-abbot-and-reforming-campus-dogmatism/
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/10/05/mit-cancels-lecture-by-uchicago-professor-who-criticized-diversity-programs/
And now for a less serious example…
Watch “Top 22 Hot Women on TikTok Destroying Feminism [Part 1]” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/oCI0Z5fj83k
I didn’t want this fight. There are plenty of other things I’d rather be doing. But since the insecure, leftist, power-hungry, moronic globalists have insisted upon dragging me onto this battlefield by endangering the future of my children, I’ll win it. Just don’t ask me to stop and be merciful in the face of evil.
The time for nice and polite has passed.
“Intellectualism” and “intelligence” are not synonyms despite what intellectuals would have you believe.
A foundational problem in education is it is revelation by a presumed authority. The teacher is revealing things to the students that the students don’t know for themselves. The students assume the teacher knows what he’s talking about and in order to get a passing grade students must assimilate the information imparted by the teacher and demonstrate a personal grasp of that information.
This works OK if the teacher is a person of principles and conscience. Meaning that the teacher acknowledges the truths achieved by those of greater intelligence than possessed by the teacher.
For instance —
“If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough.” -Albert Einstein.
If they were being honest, 99.999 percent of teachers would admit they’re not smarter than Albert Einstein.
And …
“Occam’s razor” — The Law of Parsimony. Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. The simplest and most obvious explanation is by a wide margin most often the best one.
To deconstruct Occam’s razor – A friend of mine who is a doctor and I were discussing diagnostic similarities between Information Technology systems and medical scenarios. He said that in his training in med school he was taught “Look for horses not zebras”.
Ok, so there are two principles discovered, tested and expounded by very intelligent people and long held as foundational truths.
It’s a pretty simple matter for anyone of even modest intelligence to apply those principles. When you see someone completely ignoring just those two principles you can be certain you’re dealing with someone who is intellectual but not intelligent. They are merely feeding their own desire to demonstrate intellectual superiority, not actually looking for the truth or bona fide facts. Because looking for the truth and bona fide facts is what an intelligent person does and someone who is truly intelligent is unable to ignore the truth except by an effort of will.
These are the things taught to me back in the days when teachers were people of principles and conscience. Sadly that kind of teacher is now a very rare bird indeed.
Scotty: The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain. (said with a Scottish accent)
Space, the final frontier…