Community Values

The TV is on in the Community Room. The community is undefined, but presumably it means the people who live in the building’s 40 apartments, and their guests or friends. The community is entitled to use of the room for family events: birthday parties, wedding or baby or baptismal or confirmation showers, graduation galas, family reunions, divorce or annulment commemorations, book signings, candidate kickoffs or pronouncements, landlord-sponsored and –contrived get-to-know-each-other gatherings with pizza, wings, and soda and coffee, and post-funeral gatherings. We’re in a basement. At the top of one wall are windows facing up at grates on sidewalk level. The opposite wall features glass walls and doors with venetian blinds. The blinds are typically closed. When the TV is on, it most often is tuned to the local Time Warner Spectrum channel with its endless, night-or-day loop of local weather, stories of death and mayhem or small-town thievery or depravity, the scores of high school teams, their success or failure in the sectional championships, the regional marching band competitions, the stray murder or rape, the drunk driver rocketing the wrong way on the Thruway, the statement from the sheriff’s office about the latest suspects, the mug shots of the young and accused with their surprised, scarred, and scared or defiant faces.  All to be repeated again after an appointed duration that viewers are trained to expect, such as “news on the nines” or “weather on the ones.” I walk by in the hallway outside the Community Room. As a resident, count me as a member of the community. No one is in the room. The blinds are drawn. The lights are off. The television is on, the newsreaders’ voices solemn and barely audible to a passer-by. I walk in and pick up one of two remotes sitting on the firm, faux leather chair. I click the O/I power button. Nothing happens. Someone once told me O/I stands for Out of Operation and In Operation. That does not seem plausible three decades later — if that is what I was truly told. Time was, we saw Off / On as the choices. It couldn’t be O and O, for off and on, could it? Too confusing. (I am pausing here to let you Google this modern-day mystery on my behalf. What did you discover? Thanks for coming back to finish reading.) I click the O/I on the other remote, and the massive screen on the wall goes blank, fades and cracles to black-but-not-quite-that-color, accompanied by a palpable silence. The local voices are silenced. The hearth is doused. No smoke puffs toward me or up a chimney. The electronic hearth with its comforting chatter and hum is snuffed out. The Community Room’s temperature is lowered by 1.7°F. I walk out. I do my laundry. When I return to the hallway by the Community Room, its lights are out, its blinds still drawn. And the TV is on again. I keep walking.

land of the 'free,' home of the loud

When did every medical / surgical waiting room come equipped with a blaring television? Obviously, it was not always the case. In the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and maybe Eighties, it's not as if waiting rooms had radios to distract and divert us. What did people do? Read? Fidget? Pray? Converse? But starting -- when? -- in the Nineties or Oughties, televisions became ubiquitous in waiting rooms, as well as in a plethora of public places (supermarkets, barber shops, brothels, broth houses, sports bars, cafes, bistros, restaurants, fast-food joints, wedding chapels, betting parlors, electronics departments in mega-stores, corner stores, bodegas, salons, confessionals, opium dens). Televisions showing exactly what? Blather, folderol, pablum, static, chatter. Recipes, DIY, so-called news, energetic nihilism. Stories of triumph and optimism. America's great product: homegrown cheeriness blanketing doom. (You hear people use the phrase, "a disease of denial." But isn't all disease of denial? Go further, MadAvenue is built squarely on the bedrock premise of denying the Biggest D of All, the unmentionable and unspeakable closure of all closures.) So, today I paced a waiting room, an expectant father awaiting surgical news (all went well), searching for the never-to-be-found remote, tempted to tell the reception desk person to shut it all off, wishing If I Had a Hammer. What would Thoreau do? (WWTD?)