The Big Turn-off
(Page 2 of 3)
September/October 1996
Geraldine Brooks, DoubleTake (www.doubletakemagazine.org)
At the Citizens' Association meeting, the cable guy brags about how his service offers 'more than 70 channels of the finest programming available.' Mike, beside me, fidgets on his chair. Suddenly he's speaking, softly and diffidently, as he always does. 'People here have time to talk to each other,' he says. 'I'm proud of our bad TV reception because it gets us out of our houses, and I'd kind of hate that to change because there's nine different football games to watch. Personally, I'd rather go fishing than watch the fishing channel.'
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The cable man doesn't realize that this is one of those Martin Luther moments, and that Mike has just nailed the theses to the door. His tone, when he replies, is unctuously patronizing. 'Well, that's your opinion and you're certainly entitled to it. But do you have a child?' Mike nods. 'Then you should think about his future. He's going to be at a disadvantage when he gets to college and has to compete with young people who've been exposed to all the marvelous information that cable can bring them.'
People who know Mike's boy Jake burst into loud guffaws. 'That's bullshit!' shouts our neighbor Phil. And suddenly the tone of the meeting has changed, changed utterly. If Waterford could stand up to the Confederate States of America, it certainly can stand up to Cablevision of Loudoun County.
Someone who has just moved out here from a suburb that has Cablevision is on her feet, saying what a bunch of crap the programs are, and how she had canceled her subscription after a couple of months.
'Haven't you ever heard of books?' someone else shouts. 'There's more `marvelous information' in the local library than's on 700 cable channels!' Last year, the county decided that Waterford was too small to warrant visits from the bookmobile. We had a meeting about that, too. Our neighbors Casey and Jeff donated the front room of their house--a bay-windowed storefront that used to be the village milliner--so we'd have a place to put a cooperative library.
That meeting wasn't nearly as loud as this one. The decibels don't come down until someone gets us off on a discussion of the life of Thomas Jefferson, and whether one could say it was impoverished for lack of television.