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Television Makes Me Feel Like an Outsider
The alienating effects of watching TV
In the 1979 comedy-drama “Being There,” a movie based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski, the protagonist is a man named Chauncey Gardiner. Chauncey, a middle-aged man, had spent his entire life living with a wealthy old man and tending his garden. Other than gardening, the only thing Chauncey knew about the world was what he saw on television. Once the old man died, Chauncey had to leave the estate for the first time in his life and make his way in a world he only knew through television.
Much of the time I feel like Chauncey Gardiner.
Television and My Childhood
I was born in 1958 and spent my formative years watching the events of the 1960s on television. I still remember the somber feeling surrounding everything when John Kennedy was assassinated. I remember seeing Martin Luther King leading marches, and how scary it felt when it was announced that he had been assassinated.
In the days and weeks to come, riots enveloped many of our larger cities, and the world as I knew it seemed on the brink of destruction. 2 months later I…
