Television makes people look bigger than life. I don’t care who you are – if you can manage to get on TV for some amount of time, your psychic wattage automatically increases. Witness friends, with notable excitement, exclaiming that they just saw a buddy on TV, or you, if it’s your lucky day. It may not be justified, though. You may be a dud. Working in TV, I have grown jaded. No one in the public eye impresses me anymore, because I know, if I were to meet them, they’d disappoint me no end. Just like a low budget movie with a fancy, expensive box cover, most of the people on TV regularly today are a lot of flash and very little substance.
                Case in point: John Kerry came in a couple of weeks ago to do some satellite interviews. I could tell right off the bat that I wasn’t going to vote for him. He seemed almost sour. Grumpy. Unhappy with his lot in life, or possibly, so focused on his lot in life that he didn’t have a spare second to enjoy it. I had to think about it for a moment. Would I want his life? Moving so fast everything’s a blur. Having to chat up so many nameless, faceless people in a scramble for votes. Having to rub Vaseline on my teeth so I can keep smiling, keep smiling, keep on smiling. I don’t think I would want his life. Already it’s bad enough that I have to scramble for pieces of paper to pay the bills. I don’t think I’d want to break my neck in a popularity contest, were I popular enough to enter the contest to begin with.
                But still, I wouldn’t vote for him. I’m not voting for the other one either. I didn’t see anything special there at all. Nothing to warrant all the attention.
                That’s the case with most of the “stars” I meet.
                One, a big deal country singer, was practically non-existent until the “on-air” light came on. Then you should have seen her come to life. It was fascinating to watch, but there was nothing fascinating about her. She reminded me of a car salesman.
                Even my own mundane job seems to impress people to no end. When I tell them I work at a TV station, it’s all intrigue to them. I want to tell them it’s no big deal; it’s just one of the rare things I like. I want to tell them that sometimes it’s so boring I want to scrape my eyes out with a pencil just for a change of pace. I want to tell them that TV is full of misfits who can’t do anything else. The good looking ones read the news. The ugly ones, like me, run the machinery. If it weren’t for TV, we’d all be working at Jack in the Box.
                But it all makes me wonder…
                Is everything bigger than life on TV?
                Is al Qaida bigger than life on TV? If you think about it, what are they really? A sinister, evil organization with an international reach who will be the complete undoing of Western Civilization? Or are they a few backwoods mountain men who bought a couple of plane tickets and scored a big hit? Are they really that huge of a threat, or is it blown all out of proportion? When you see pictures of Osama waddling through the mountains with his walking stick, do you get scared? Or do you think “what a hick?”
                When market analysts talk about “consumer confidence” are they talking about anything at all? Is it that easy to pigeon-hole the American public’s buying habits? You can’t guess who’s going to win American Idol, but you can figure out the American economy by what people bought at Wal-Mart last month?
                And without sounding too callous, would 9-11 have affected us as profoundly as it did if it hadn’t been for the constant re-broadcast of the crashes and the collapse? Would there have been as much of a fuss? Do you see murals and lapel buttons and t-shirts with the pentagon or a barren field on them?
                Does TV automatically cause people to become star-struck with whatever or whoever they’re seeing at the moment?
                I think it does.
                Explain Governor Arnie.
                Explain gas prices starting to go up the day after 9-11.
                Explain the PT Cruiser, for god’s sake.
                Smoke and mirrors. That’s what TV is.
                News anchors look smart because they hardly look at their scripts when reading, but that’s only because the prompter operator had an extra cup of coffee and is looking super lively.
                They’re good looking because the set designer knew precisely how to hit them with the studio lights.
                It’s looks.
                9-11 looked like the end of the world, so we believed it. We still do. Kind of. I think the general American public is beginning to question the same things that conspiracy “kooks” were questioning on 9-12. But there will always be smoke and mirrors.
                Everything on TV is a magic show.
                Sometimes, the magicians don’t even know all the tricks.