Musings on the 10 June 2020 ~
or the joy of being TV-free (Part 2)

Published: 10 June 2020

“Threw the television out and it was one of the best things that I ever did,” so said my friend Collin, as I recorded in my previous article.

What ignited this conversation on independent minds and symbolic images of TV sets tossed resolutely into rubbish skips, was the mutual notoriety that we had both gained from the public knowledge that neither of us owned or watched TV. Whenever I revealed this fact to anyone, I could guarantee responsive shock of seismic proportions: “What, you haven’t got a telly?!” ~ they would cry in disbelief.

Time for a bit of Frank Zappa

This is not to say, unfortunately, that I am happily oblivious to what is going on in the world. In today’s technologically hard-wired world, even though I eschew ownership of a so-called smartphone, I still use a computer for research and by which to write, and on this necessary evil the news is but a click away.

When I want to know what is happening, feel the need to know what is happening and/or just feel the need to annoy myself, I go to Google News, that is Google aggregated news, or as I have christened it, Google Aggravating News. And there it is: the whole world and its ills. However, lest we forget, it is the whole world and its ills predominantly filtered through the lens of the liberal left.

At no other time in my personal history of non-TV ownership have I had so much reason to rejoice as recently. I cannot imagine how awful it must be to be placed on a strict diet of coronavirus doom and gloom. I know that there are people out there who suffer from the same inability as mobile phone users ~ they simply cannot turn the telly off. How do such people survive? Do they survive? In this age of news surfeit, with rolling news channels churning out the same disturbing images over and over again, underscored by the same relentless and inevitably biased commentary, it is a marvel we can think at all. We do, don’t we?

Frank Zappa again.

Reasons to be cheerful part 2 was when I heard from my wife, who is an inveterate social media twiddler, that it was riot season again. No, I am not a liberal subversive. My joy came from the realisation that as I did not have a TV, I could ‘tune off and drop out’ ~ that sounds suspicious!

As soon as I was apprised of the facts, white cop USA kills black suspect, I thought, ‘Hello, here we go!’  I knew as you did, that we were in for a grand media fest: acres of newsprint and airtime given over to mob rule, rioting, street unrest, arson, violence, looting. I had, in effect, one of those distinctly déjà vu moments.

The following day a couple of articles in the UK liberal press confirmed my suspicions that the fallout from a crime committed on the other side of the world was about to be encouraged in the UK.

Naah, I thought, don’t need it. My status as a non-TV owner would grant me some immunity, but in order to batten down the hatches I would need to avoid goggling on Google. One part of me was arguing, surely not. That is to say, that surely people are not so stupid as to start rampaging through the streets in the midst of a pandemic. It was a little ray of logic that I knew was but a straw. Letting go of that, I life-rafted into the comfort zone of where I was located, thankfully far away from the artillery of the western media and scenes of abject capitulation that surely would follow as dark follows light. Alas, my incorrigible twiddling wife driven by her social media addiction, could not help but leak snippets of information to me, which I tried to avoid as if they were carnivals.

With Covid-19 conspiracies cascading around our ears like confetti at a fallen angels wedding, who could blame anyone for entertaining the suggestion that in the matter of the riots extreme liberal factions are at work behind the scenes provoking and antagonising, attempting to disempower law enforcement agencies so that they ultimately lose control of the streets. Or is it all just an epic miscalculation? After all, something similar happened in the UK about thirty years ago with the premature curtailment of stop and search laws, the disastrous result being …

I was just thinking wistfully bring back the Sweeney, flared polyester trousers, thick knotted Axminster ties and proper-job policing, when the words of my old childhood physician echoed in my ears, and other parts of the body. “Clear the decks!” he would say, meaning drop your trousers, which he always asked you to do when you presented with an earache. They’d certainly have pulled his statue down if he had had one erected! Come to think of it, they probably wouldn’t.

With his words ringing in my ears (he never did get to the bottom of my tinnitus) and my trousers still on, it did make me think that it was time to take evasive action before the decks of my mind became strewn with the sort of liberal tat that I would not get five bob for if I took it to Peacock’s auction.

“Wife!” said I, “Desist!”

I do not know whether she understood me or not, but the cat did, as he promptly sat on her mobile phone.

And so it has been that for the last four to five days I have, how does the expression go, simply ‘not gone there’, and by boycotting Google News and in fact any kind of media output, I have harvested the twin benefit of not only avoiding the ghost of Enoch Powell  but also losing touch with coronavirus confusion. It has certainly been a win-win situation!

Of course, with Arsebook never far away, my wife continues to sneak information piecemeal to me, but I have adopted the expedient of placing my hands over my ears. It cannot be right can it?  That they uprooted Nelson Mandela’s statue in Parliament Square and tossed it into a cabbage patch? Perhaps it was Lord Nelson’s statue or the statue of Ron Nelson, a fish and chip man from Scunthorpe … or could it have been …*

*For one night only, due to Rioter’s demands, BBC 1 presents the National Historic Figures Statue Desecration Ceremony live from the Arthur Hall (please note that Prince Arthur is currently being investigated under the Racist Statues of England Act so will not be in attendance. The fact that he died many years ago does not make him less culpable of things he never said or did in an age which is so remote from our own that even a female Dr Who is having difficulty finding it.)

If you live in a country that has not yet ventured down the road of multiculturalism, pause for a moment. The social experiment comes at a price, and the interest on the debt is something you’ll never repay ~ Source: a man who did not make it into The Museum of Tolerance but was later inducted into the Hall of Sagacious Fame (please note statue removed) and was then prosecuted for inciting commonsense

In brave new America, leaders kneel and looters are saluted.

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