The Power of Television

Get behind me Sayten! cries the little man with the television blaring constantly before him. With a surge of determination he thrusts himself from the sofa and snaps off the television. It instantly turns back on again. For a moment he considers tossing the box out the window to the sidewalk twenty stories below, but then he reconsiders, knowing that Oprah will be on in a couple of hours. But for two hours he can, and must, forsake the box of Sayten and step out upon the plain and see with his own eyes the glory of Gawd.

Such wondrous light pours through dusty panes of sliding glass; praise be the morning sun, and the million beams of refracted light once it passes through his glass eyeballs into the cave of his skull. He wants to boogey in this wonderland, but can’t find the remote to turn on the stereo. He supposed there was, perhaps, a button directly on the contraption, but he feared approaching too closely to the mechanism, for he saw in its face the same tattoo as that on the box of Sayten: Sony. Sony be the name of the evil one’s dominions, and knowing thy enemy’s name is the first step towards defeating them.

He cried out in agony. This light pierces the membrane of my mind; I cannot take it much longer, for he had watched television in a darkened room for so long that his eyes could not adjust to direct sunlight. He throws himself into a closet and slams shut the door.

Now let us consider the predicament of this man. Driven by his crude animal instincts to wile away the hours of his life, his true conflict arises from that trace of nobility in his blood, that desire to rise up above his nature and strive for some future goal, glimmering on the horizon of the evening like some holy grail. But is it his base instincts, or this trace of aspiration that drives him to misery? Would it not perhaps grant him the greatest peace to snuff that last remaining spark that glimmers in his breast, and permit him the leisure of living his remaining days in simple distraction, guilt free?

He weeps, collapsed there at the foot of the closet, in the draping cloth of dress shirts and garment bags, resting on the mounds of Rockport and Nike and Addidas, like wrecked vessels upon the reef, without a captain or crew, without a foot to guide them free of the rocks. In the darkness of this three foot by six foot cell, he clings to the shaft of light piercing the dark, a quarter inch slit between the sliding doors. With tears in his eyes he takes hold of the dress slacks hanging from strong wooden hangers and pulls himself up, and pries his fingers into the crevice and slides open the closet doors. Freedom never tasted so clear and refreshing. Like a delirious sailor washed upon the shore, he stumbles into the living room and begins to laugh hysterically through tears of elation and relief, as though discovering civilization just over the dunes and scrub brush; the television proclaims from across the room that Oprah, that dark Gawdess of daytime broadcasting, will be back after these messages.