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If Kashmiri separatists can agree to talk peace with India’s hard-line Hindus, and former South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky can revisit his now-communist homeland, there is hope across America on this Super Bowl Sunday for negotiation and peace over the TV remote control.
Certain inventions change life as we know it, often unintentionally: the car, airplane, atomic energy, microwave ovens, cellphones, the Internet, hair coloring, tooth-whitening strips. Television also altered life. Americans now believe truth is what they see, not what they read. Few inventions ignited the lifestyle revolution like the TV remote, a little box once worked with wires and now with invisible and presumably benevolent light rays. Not bad for the battery business either.
In the 1950s, Robert Adler was a physicist at Zenith Radio. His boss wanted a device to mute obnoxious TV commercials invented by obnoxious people selling cars and soaps like Latin tutors, through mind-numbing repetition of commercial conjugations. Enabling viewers to twitch a finger and alter the screen at boredom’s first whiff, Zenith transformed TV’s environment. Remotes quickened TV’s pace. They encouraged more channels and drove ads to be more story, less drumbeat. Have you noticed that there are no ads between the end of one program and another’s start? That’s prime finger-twitching time.
Remotes assist obesity, enabling channel-changing while continuously eating. Hard to believe, but changing one channel once involved standing up, walking across the room, bending and turning a dial every time. How did those pioneers survive? Try that with a 200-channel favorites list.
Remotes may play a role in American divorces. According to popular belief, sports-minded males like to control TV remotes, and their fingers rarely settle on the tissue-driven dramas favored by many females. Familial peace requires loving compromise. Or a second TV. Remotes have caused proliferation of sets from the TV room, once called the family room, even into bedrooms, once considered quiet, private places. There’s a reason why DirecTV this week offers free installation of a satellite dish serving three TVs in a home, with separate remotes for each. Wasn’t it President Lincoln, a Bears fan, who said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”?
Even though by April many viewers won’t remember today’s teams, and another Super Bowl will erupt in 2005, this year’s contest between two Eastern gangs in large pads and tattoos carries such overpowering import that millions have built their entire Sunday around a remote kickoff in Texas.
Super Bowls drive TV sales each winter. They make up most of history’s most-watched shows among both men and women. This suggests the program’s ability to impose a one-day truce on the remote-war home front. May it be so in your house.