One self improvement I decided on recently is to finish what I start. I vowed this while on a treadmill at the gym, glancing from television screen to television screen, never, in the hour I was there, sticking on one screen long enough to become immersed. I got some Anderson Cooper (were things different chemically and would it not involve the disruption of many lives and were he to ask, looking straight, as he must, into my eyes as he did so, yes, I would marry Anderson Cooper), Shark Tank, a little Idol or The Voice, CSI something or other, American Ninja Warrior, and, on ESPN or ESPN 2, a 30 for 30.
I should admit that I’m a big fan of TV. I didn’t, however, always believe this. I would, to myself and others, say mean things about television, all the standard stuff: there’s nothing worth watching, commercials suck, it’s draining the life from us all, blah blah blah. But one day my companion pointed out that I love to watch the 49ers on TV, and the Giants, and, especially with my friend Chris, the Buckeyes, and, more recently, ever since Johnny Football arrived, the Browns, and cage fighting. My companion noted that when my daughter was one, two, three years old, I’d rock her to sleep as, right there on the television before me, Randy Couture or Anderson Silva or Suga Rashad Evans bloodied another man half to death.
“That’s not TV,” I argued. “That’s sports.”
“That’s not sports,” she shot back. “That’s attempted murder.”
It took awhile, but I came around: Watching sports on TV is watching TV. It’s indeed hard to escape the the no-frills logic of it. And then, once I admitted my love for TV, it took little to expand my tastes: The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood, of course, but also the multitudes of their lesser cousins, including The United States of Tara, Breaking Bad, and Luther, as well as cousins once or twice removed, as it were, from the royal family: Sons of Anarchy, The Shield, Justified. And from there, it’s mere clicks to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
All of which is to say that I was not on the treadmill scanning from screen to screen because I was uninterested in what was on each respective channel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anderson Cooper alone, as I say, can usually hold my attention for hours. (While I do not wish horror on this world, I do admit that when I hear of some tragedy I engage in quick silent calculations to determine if the tragedy is Anderson-worthy. It is satisfying in no meaningful way—spiritually, emotionally, intellectually—to note, at the news of an Ebola outbreak or the downing of a jet airliner, a slight uptick in the spirits. But there you have it.)
No, it wasn’t disinterest.
What it was is an almost obsessive inability to finish anything I start, including, apparently, watching a simple transaction or song or race on television. How long have I been so afflicted? When did the malady strike? Striding exactly nowhere on the treadmill, I tried but failed to answer these questions. I couldn’t concentrate long enough to think it through. Had it been a year? Some months? A week? Mere days? I vowed to fix the problem. And then my mind turned to other matters.
On the way home, I picked up a half gallon of Moose Tracks, which I thought would help me write about Robin Williams. I wanted the courage to ask why anyone who didn’t know him in the flesh would care that he had died. “Care” is too hard, perhaps. What I was trying to understand was why regular people with no connection whatsoever to Williams, his family, Hollywood, etc, were claiming to be distraught, or at least very saddened, by his suicide. I thought I needed the Moose Tracks to confess that I was fairly revolted by Mrs. Doubtfire and found Williams to be, for the most part, an exhaustingly selfish performer, often a bore. But even had I loved Williams’ work and thought him, as did CNN and Fox and NPR, a genius, what would I be mourning? The notion that I’d miss out on performances that might have one day existed? The loss of some future art in the world? Maybe. But that’s not what people were saying, not on TV at least, and not on the radio. People were mourning him, or pretending to. Mourning him as if they knew him, as if they had a relationship with him, as if we have become so cynical that the way we mourn is via some fantastical construction that makes Robin Williams—an image, really–more real than actual human beings in our midsts actually suffering. It’s easy, I’m thinking, to mourn Robin Williams, or for him; it’s harder to mourn for our neighbor because our neighbor might, seeing our concern, ask something of us. And, exhausted ourselves, cynical, what have we left to give?
I think that’s what I was meaning to get at last week with the Baldwin quote. Here it is, again: “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
The end.