Idiot box

About a month ago, in a momentary lapse of insanity, I agreed to take out a long-dead car radio and install an LED screen with several functions: radio, DVD player and TV (with the aid of an ABS-CBN black box).

I figured if it would help bring some peace during long travel, and I’m not talking about trips to Laguna or Baguio but trips within Metro Manila, then the expense would be well worth it.

In the last few years I’ve reduced my viewing of television mostly because I figured that the little free time I had left, would be best devoted to reading, mainly on the internet, where I can roam the country, from Inquirer to Mindanao News, to overseas papers from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post to The New York Times. These online
papers have so much to offer, including multimedia coverage from podcasts to virtual reality videos, and over a wide range of topics, not just news but also arts and culture, science and technology, sports, book reviews.

Now, with the LED screens in the car, I’ve wondered if I can invoke the Distracted Driving Law, which mainly prohibits the use of cell phones, to keep the LED video off.

But the kids are addicted now, and subtly threaten a return to civil strife inside the car without DVDs or TV.

Mind you, TV inside the car hasn’t brought a ceasefire with the kids. They still squabble over which channel to watch, and who has vantage viewing seats in the car.

But the worst part is that while the kids are quieter now, the trade-off is having to bear with the inane fare streaming in, and giving new meaning to the term “idiot box.”

According to the website English Language and Usage, the term “idiot box” as a description of television dates to 1957, only a few years after it was invented. Moreover, the term was first coined to refer to experimental chambers used by the US military to mimic desert conditions—high temperatures and low humidity—and see how it would affect soldiers.

TV inside the car captures the two meanings of idiot box, i.e., not just mindless viewing but also a kind of torture chamber.

To be fair, I have to say there’s been some improvement with more feature programs with investigative journalism, as well as a few documentary types with light but informative fare, from cooking and tourism to arts, culture and, still too rarely, science. There’s still a tendency to oversimplify issues, and to use sensationalism, but I’d like to think that with time, these programs will become more popular, and encourage media networks to produce more shows around that genre.

Alas, when the remote is with the kids, the preferred programs are the matinee shows now no longer confined to noontime slots. There are singing competitions and more singing competitions. Again, to be fair, some of the competitions have some redeeming value, with the likes of Lea Salonga and other professional singers providing sound advice for the amateur contestants.

I know this will make me sound like I was on the moon for several years but I was shocked to find Willy Revillame still hosting a program, “Wowowee” now replaced by “Wowowin,” still very popular with large audiences with his dancing girls and audiences scrambling to compete for prizes. The whole atmosphere is that of a circus except that there are no elephants or lions … just humans.

‘Telenovelas’

Then there are the countless telenovelas, with the usual crime and cleavage menu and slow moving plots and scripts that sound like they were generated by software, with the most popular lines being: “Papatayin kita” or “Patayin mo na” (usually males) and “Huwag, huwag” and “maawa ka” (usually females). One time I pointed these recurring lines to my son, even predicting when the actors would say, and I was shocked myself at how accurate I was, the driver laughing and getting into the act.

I thought, with some dread, that maybe it’s these telenovelas (and movies) that have in a sense immunized Filipinos to the extent that real-world killings, especially the extrajudicial types, are not too shocking or traumatizing.

Compared to the violence, teleseryes with romantic fare are almost welcome. If anything, they at least portray a world where love is rarely forever and where the plots are much more complicated, including the most convoluted configurations: man loves his wife but also loves his boyfriend, who the wife loves as well but in the end, wife leaves husband for another woman who turns out to be a transwoman. I made that up, but wouldn’t be surprised if some teleserye already hatched up such a story line.

What happened to the old-fashioned love stories?

Competing with the telenovelas are reality or so-called reality shows: select a few people from thousands of applicants and put them in a house and, like the original idiot box of the US military, watch them go crazy (read: fall in and out of love).

Ah, but the public is wiser than you think. Many know that there are scripts as well in these reality shows and that they can be as tedious as telenovelas. More exciting are the nagbabagang balita—burning news—not about the Philippines and martial law but about celebrities hooking up, breaking up, breaking down. Real people, real news.

The really old-fashioned themes are now used only for advertisements, for example, those that tell you if you use a certain brand of a shampoo, men will line up trying to touch your hair and that all that will lead to the altar.

When the car TV is on, I remind the driver to keep his eyes on the road and on the steering wheel. Or, if I drive with the family in the car, I negotiate to switch off the TV and use the radio (which may not be that much better). I’ve started to buy DVDs again, so I can use them to entice the kids away from TV. It works most of the time but is still tricky. Documentaries are still too boring for them, and if you get a movie, despite the traffic gridlocks, you don’t usually get to finish the movie in one ride, which can bring whining and protests.

One time, exasperated, I told the kids maybe the situation will improve when we get smart TVs for cars and they can roam the internet for smarter fare.

They were quiet and I wondered how the TV program—more of the “Papatayin kita” stuff—could calm them so.

Then I realized they were all on their phones and iPads.

“Why aren’t you watching TV?” I asked.

“There’s nothing to watch,” my son replied, without looking up from his iPad.

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