Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Drag Me To Health Care” edition

At some point during the Great Digital Conversion, the sleepy little mouse inside the wheel that powers the local CBS station transmitter decided to “Go Galt” and hasn’t been heard from since. Which means CBS has effectively gone dark for We Of The Rabbit Ears. Which wasn’t entirely surprising since for as long as anyone can remember, CBS’s signal strength has been of the near-beer variety for anyone not sleeping on fire escape under their transmitter.

(What are the real-world consequences of this?
Well, when I saw him at Da Jewels,
I almost didn’t recognize teevees Jay Levine

because he didn’t look like this.)

Now if I had the license to print money that comes with owning a teevee station and I was locked a state of perpetual and aggressive competition with other local stations, making sure customers are able to, y’know, receive our effing signal would be very high up there on the priority list.

But that’s just me, and even though I attended yesterday’s Chicago Media Future Conference, took reeeal good notes and learned many short, clever, declarative and mutually-annihilating sentences about the state of journalism (about which more later), judging by my ongoing mystification over things like why – as the mainstream media continues to cry poormouth and shed thousands of jobs – talent-free meatsticks like Bill Kristol and Richard Cohen continue to collect paychecks...it is clear I know nothing about the media.

Oh the embarrassment.

So, who knows; maybe the whole CBS thing is a kind of agricultural subsidy?

Maybe over at McClurg Court they get big, gummint checks for promising not to shovel slop like “How I Met Your Mother”, “The New Adventures of Old Christine” and “Million Dollar Password" any further than you can throw a pizza underwater…while down the dial former ghost channels that show “Hellenic Heartbeat” and reruns of “Kate Loves a Mystery” pour through the screen all sparkly and clear.

This explanation would deeply delight me on some perverse level, but wouldn’t explain why NBC also suddenly cut out mid-sentence: a clean , strong digital signal one minute and flatline the next.

So until I grid out the castle and start moving from square to square holding my antenna like Diogenes looking for an honest man, Sunday Morning is being patched together out of remnants from the channels that are left and streaming video.

And what was squirming under the rocks this Sunday?

Very little.

George Will let America know that Iran is full of kids, who have access to thingies called “computers” and “cell phones” and “satellite dishes”, and under that withering technological onslaught, maintaining an “intellectual autarchy” is impossible.

Leaving aside the fact that technology is pitilessly agnostic (and that, far from being smasked by tech, Iran’s “intellectual autarchy" sailed into power at least in part thanks to the 1970s version of the iPod), Mr. Will may be right or he may be wrong, but I'd have a whole lot more confidence assessments of the fate and future of Iran vis-à-vis Farsi youth culture halfway around the world if it weren’t so painfully evident that those predictions were coming from someone who’s overall comprehension of humans under the age of sixty is marooned somewhere between the "Village of The Giants"


and "Hair".



George Will also said that Americans are perfectly competent to navigate the foot-thick-contract, claims-denying viper pit of the private insurance market because Americans have mastered the ice box...their wireless Marconi devices... Velcro “computers”.


I don’t know about what sort of “computer” George Will yells at when the toast doesn’t pop out

but the ones I use on a regular basis don’t operate on a profit model where Dell or Apple get paid based on how successfully they deny me access to the internet.

Will also lightly echoes Mitt Romney’s

horror movie vision of Obamacare.

(Romney here demonstrates what he believes
health care in an Obama Administration

will look like.)

Romney cheerfully explained that Democrats are rapacious monsters who – if given a chance to shape health care policy in any way (apparently excluding all of the dozens of health care programs the Gummint already successfully runs) – will rip you off, kill you and sell your parts to evil doers.

Which is weird, because I though only Republicans sold American arms

to terrorists.

Boo-ya!

But seriously, if every American who works in public service is a socialist idiot who destroys everything they touch, why can't we just import a bunch of Iranian 20-year-olds?

I mean, if they're verging on something as grand and difficult and revolutionary as text-messaging Iran's “intellectual autarchy" into the ash heap of history, then surely with their “computers” and "blue teeth" and fancy Twittering toasters they can figure out a way for Americans to have universal, affordable health care.