Too Much TV Has Left Him a Little Fuzzy

Long ago I read a short story--it might have been by A. E. Coppard--about two beautiful young people who are cast away on an island paradise whose inhabitants all are covered by a thick white fuzz.

The natives are friendly; life is idyllic; the young couple couldn’t be happier--until one morning they discover tiny spots of white fuzz on each other’s face.

I think television is turning us all into fuzz.

I used to read a lot. I still have at least 2,000 books in my house. I still buy books, but they pile up unread, or started and never finished. When I was young I read Will Durant’s histories and John Gunther’s “Inside” books and I thought I had at least a faint idea what had happened and what was happening.

When television first burst upon the world I resisted it. Our two boys were actually the last ones in our block who didn’t have a TV set. That full-page TV ad back in the 1950s that showed an unhappy kid sitting on a curb alone--the only kid on the block whose family didn’t have TV--struck home. My mother finally bought us a set for the sake of the children.

Even then we watched it sparingly. Most evenings it was dark, while I sat in my easy chair and read. I let the boys watch on Saturday nights--”Have Gun Will Travel” and “Gunsmoke,” one after the other. They were our church. Virtue always triumphed. Force was used only in the interest of right, and what was right was obvious. The villains bit the dust. Paladin sometimes quoted Shakespeare. “Gunsmoke’s” Matt Dillon might have something going on upstairs with Kitty, but we were spared the sweaty close-ups.

Not only television has retrogressed since those days, but so have we. My wife and I are becoming that repulsive new vegetable--the couch potato. I know that many educational films are to be seen on TV, but when a scene from one of them flashes on the screen--baby hawks hatching, baby seals flapping on a beach, 2,000 Chinese doing calisthenics in a square, starved natives lined up for rice in a dusty village, a naval battle in World War II, caterpillars metamorphosing--I move on to the next channel, not without a feeling of guilt.

We are not hooked on so-called situation comedies. Most of them are so crude they insult what intelligence we have left. We have often watched “L.A. Law” because it reassures us that lawyers are greedy, vain, ambitious, cutthroat, lecherous and altruistic. It’s lots of fun.

We do try to keep up on the news by reading the newspaper, and following such momentous events as the political conventions on TV; that coverage was one rung above situation comedy, though I was dismayed to hear the distinguished electronic journalist Peter Jennings say to David Brinkley, “I heard you and he talking. . . .” Television news, it seems to me, is kaleidoscopic, a display of fake jewels in a cheap bazaar. Usually it is capped by comic relief, like fat men doing belly flops in a pool.

We have regressed to watching movies. It is ritualistic. Almost every evening we put aside our books and magazines, open a bottle of wine and sit in TV twilight watching some recent two-star movie we’ve never heard of with actors we’ve never heard of, or can’t quite place.

Some aren’t bad, though most are violent and sexy. We’ve seen so many car chases it seems that every car in the nation must be wrecked; we’ve seen hundreds of bouts of spontaneous lovemaking that never seem to end in pregnancy.

Often we watch golden oldies on the American Movie Classics channel. We’ve seen Westerns, Easterns, old gangster movies, old Lucille Ball movies, old war movies, old heartache movies, old courtroom dramas, old kid-grows-up movies, old musicals with Betty Grable or June Haver or Alice Faye. God help us, the other night we even saw Don Ameche in “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.” Inevitably, some softening of the brain must result from this continuous exposure to these ancient myths. Some aren’t bad, but most are boring and silly.

This week we’re going to see “Forever Amber,” with Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde.

Meanwhile, I’m watching for that little spot of white fuzz to appear on my forehead.