For about a year or two now, I’ve noticed that every time I watch TV, I see something unbelievably life-negating. Far from complaining about rising curseword count or 3/4-naked girlies, I am having a real problem digesting morbid material that we too often take for granted (see also this discussion ). I like to think of such content as falling under the ‘death instinct’ as opposed to ‘life instinct’ images and concerns, such as beauty, positivity, cooperation, community, dignity, etc. After a especially discordant stretch of seeing things I just don’t want to see, I figured I would keep a short-lived log of the incidences and types of overt death-instinct content I find, mostly consisting of the following:

Torture (physical/mental, almost ecstatically described nowadays)

Murder (esp. mass murder or killing on a massive scale, excluding non-morbid material such as many military history programs)

Corpse Fetishism (dominating the major networks is an obsession with autopsies, crime scenes, body decomposition, etc.)

Aberrant Psychology (hard to define yet everywhere. Obsession with serial killers, S&M, any extremely unhealthy person/lifestyle)

I’m going to stick to this sort of material, leaving out other harmful media emphases, like pervasive klepto consumerism, scaremongering, conformity, racism, misogyny, etc. I’m instead focusing on the stuff I consider immediately ugly from an aesthetic view. My thesis is that all this undermining of our human aesthetic needs is contributing to a darker American era and psyche. It’s not okay that the culture has given my girlfriend and I this residual need to talk about John Wayne Gacy for half-an hour. After all, how many hours of this fucker’s life have I had on TV as background, even at dinnertime! Again I cite the television producer who complained that during Sweeps, the censors wouldn’t let his show feature the naked back of the lovely leading lady, but let the CSI-style programs show nude female corpses while entertaining the viewer as to the locations and quantities of semen left on her by her attacker.

Being fully aware that many of my audience already agree with this and in fact watch less TV than I do, I still have this need to make a topical collage of everything that makes up my ‘normal’ day of television. It’s best to list my channel biases so that we can see where the bulk of the material is showing:

• The History Channel
• FX
• A&E
• Animal Planet (my fav channel by far)
• Comedy Central (biggest culprit–anyone surprised?)
• Cartoon Network (Adult Swim gets harder to watch every week)
• MSNBC/CNN (tho I now avoid these like the plague)
• NBC (I don’t watch it much, but I will for this column so I can get the 300 CSI shows on here)
• FOX

Final Note: I will not overpopulate the list I keep of what those channels are showing. I know from experience that healthy content is almost totally eclipsed by its opposite, and so I have no need to present anything but a perfectly accurate timetable. I’d say I have the TV on for about four to five hours a day, often just as background while I paint miniatures or read. My log will only show what was playing at the time, so I won’t keep specific track of what I watched as opposed to what I just changed or shut off.

Please find this as tragically hilarious as I do. Lab monkeys have it better than Constant Viewer.