The media: trite and liking it

When I went home for winter break, there were the usual distractions and complications that… When I went home for winter break, there were the usual distractions and complications that invariably crowd a holiday: high school friends to see, family to see, cable television to see – all of those important, time-sucking problems. They were nothing, however, compared to the only issue anyone was able to discuss at the time; that is, of course, the terrifying War on Christmas.

You remember that, right? It was only a few months ago. Everyone was freaking out about what they should say to shoppers. The two options seemed to be, as I recall, either the secular greeting “Happy Holidays” or to praise Jesus and His Glorious Holy Virgin Birth, instead, to complete strangers. Because, hey, what says religion like consuming products, right? After all, this was a terribly important issue, right?

Because how could something that the media talked about obsessively not be important? Particularly Fox News?

You can tell that this was an important issue because we still talk about it now. In fact, just the other day, a friend and I were talking about the whole “Happy Holidays” issue and – no, I can’t do this. I can’t lie. I don’t have any friends.

But, if I did have friends I talked to, I certainly wouldn’t be talking about that. I mean, do you talk about this with your friends? No. Of course you don’t. You aren’t psychotic.

That wasn’t an actual issue. No one talked about that except for the media and maybe a few unhinged wing-nut evangelical Christians. Actually, let me take that back. Other people did talk about that, but not in the “I can’t believe this horrible War on Christmas has invaded my Judeo-Christian dominated Western culture” way one would imagine if one were watching news talk shows about the issue. Instead, people more or less thought and said “Why is the media so one-dimensional and stupid? Idiots! Boring, overpaid idiots!” Or something to that effect.

That, at least, was my reaction. I was sitting there on Pitt’s exceedingly long two-week winter break, and I just thought that this was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. Well, maybe not as stupid as Garfunkel instigating the break-up of Simon and himself so he could concentrate on his acting career – dude, I totally didn’t make that up – but pretty stupid.

Since I was at home and bored, in that pleasant at-home-and-bored way, I started thinking about how nice it would be to write a column bashing this whole War on Christmas business. And that’s when I realized something – I couldn’t do that. If I wrote about the War on Christmas, all I would be doing is contributing to the problem. I would be the snake biting his own tail.

I am the media, so how can I hate it? How can I comment on it without adding legitimacy to whatever stupid issue that the media is talking about right now? Say, for example, I wrote an article about how this whole “stop snitching” T-shirt thing. Say I argued that it is totally a media-created problem, in that there has always been a history of silence and witness intimidation in impoverished areas and, while these T-shirts are reprehensible, they aren’t a new problem. If I wrote this, everyone would be bored because this issue has been talked about a million times before and no one is adding anything new to it.

It’s like that friend you have who always has the same conversation topics. Don’t you hate that friend? Well, that friend is the media. We’re never saying anything new. All we’re doing is commenting on each others comments and replying to other responses and we just keep going on and on until you wish we would just shut the hell up. But we won’t, because you love it, somehow. Secretly, you need it. Everybody needs an adversary, after all; maybe the media fills that role in everyone’s life.

But what about me, how am I supposed to deal with all of this? I don’t want to think of new topics to discuss. Can’t I just bash the thing everybody else is talking into the ground? Can’t I just be that lazy bastard who repeats water-cooler topics as if they were pressing issues that had never occurred to anyone? Don’t I have the freedom – no, not the freedom, but the responsibility – to only discuss over-discussed issues? Isn’t that why I exist? Isn’t that why I’m paid 2.5 cents a word?

Because, let me tell you, this is the best you’re getting out of me for a while. Now, who wants to discuss stranger danger? Anybody?

Sound off to Kevin Sharp in the most trite way you can think of at kjs34@pitt.edu. Maybe he’ll answer reader mail in his next column. That’s overdone, too.