The Devil Television made me do it

It’s become a cliche in our society that, when life gives you lemons, you sue the pants… It’s become a cliche in our society that, when life gives you lemons, you sue the pants off the lemon tree. If you’ve lived on a diet of McDonald’s food for most of your life, then wake up one day to find yourself obese – well, Ronald McDonald is going to have to pay the piper, because you are large and in charge. You’ll wipe the smirk off that clown’s face.

Reportedly, in some areas of California, a young man’s first lawsuit is considered a rite of passage, inspiring confetti and speechmaking. Afterward, he is attended by a dozen lawyers, who take him into a back room and “make a man out of a boy.”

It’s also become cliche to point out how gosh-darn silly it is that people sue for severely misguided reasons – or just because they are bored. That’s like shooting fat-ass fish in a fry vat.

So I apologize for bringing this up again, but I think these ridiculous lawsuits sometimes have deeper meanings. Today’s case study is a West Bend, Wisc. man who wants to sue his cable company for causing his wife to be overweight and his children to be lazy.

Quoted in the Fond du Lac, Wisc., Reporter, Timothy Dumouchel says, “I believe that the reason I smoke and drink every day and my wife is overweight is because we watched TV every day for the last four years.” His children are also “lazy channel-surfers.” As opposed to the active channel-surfers who usually make captain of the football team.

I can understand Dumouchel’s lament. If I watched television every day, smoke and drink would probably be the only thing keeping me sane. And my strength would be so sapped that I’d barely be able to lift the remote. We all know the feeling you get from watching too much television – lethargic yet restless; emotionally tired, but wired at the same time; mentally active, but only on a primitive, reptilian level. Like those snakes at the zoo that only come outside to bask in the sun, except that we bask in television’s glow.

He tried to do something. He called the cable company and told them to disconnect it. But they didn’t. Dumouchel put the television in the basement, where no one could watch it, but his wife hauled it back upstairs. If she somehow found the inner strength to do that, why not make her daily exercise moving the television up from the basement? Ten or twenty reps of that, and you’d blast away those flabby abs.

Dumouchel missed that opportunity, instead making a deal with his wife that she and the kids could watch until the cable company disconnected his service. Despite several calls by the frantic father, the channels kept coming. For four years. Meanwhile, the Dumouchels were held hostage, prisoners of their own entertainment. There are no reports as to whether they thought to board up the windows and doors or turn off the television.

It’s easy to be a bit snarky about ludicrous lawsuits, until you think about how many people are in the same position. How many hours a day do you spend in front of the television, not really watching anything? Afterwards, do you remember that time? Did it make you lazy and fat? Probably not, but would you sue for those hours back, if you could?

It’s hard to buy Dumouchel’s argument that he was physically addicted to television, and harder still to blame the cable company, who mainlined over fifty channels into his house for free. It’s not hard, though, to wonder why the television occupies the central space in so many living rooms, or why people who come home from work exhausted flip on the television for another few hours of exhaustion. But that point has also already been made; books like Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television have already pointed an accusatory finger at the Couch Potato Nation. National studies about the “obesity epidemic” blame the fat of the land on a lack of couch-free activity; social psychologists whine that we’ve become a country of cubicle-dwelling loners who go home to TV dinners and reruns of “Law and Order.”

None of them have proposed any solutions short of turning back the clock to a pre-television age. That’s why it’s up to people like Dumouchel to lead us out of the darkness and into the light. It’s an ingenious plan, really. As compensation for his overweight wife and lazy kids, who all got that way by sitting in front of a screen full of moving pictures every day, Dumouchel is asking Carter Cable to give him three computers and a lifetime of free Internet service. Presumably so he can instant message his kids in the other room and ask how glad they are to have finally ditched that demon television.

Jesse Hicks is a big ol’ Luddite. Send him smoke signals at jhicks@pittnews.com.