My Musings

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Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Freedom of Speech

[This Sunday I leave for college, which means today I probably would have been wise to start packing. Instead, I began the highly valuable and intellectually challenging task of organizing my word documents, putting them from one big folder into lots of little ones. I didn't come close to finishing, but I did discover an old, unposted blog entry which I had for some reason saved in the same folder as all my other documents instead of my separate Blog folder. Expecting a half-finished piece of garbage, I was much surprised when I read the entry and saw that it was pretty much finished. Why I never actually posted it, I have no clue -- maybe I meant to add more and never got around to it, or maybe I just simply forgot. In any case, here it is, very late, and better late than never.]

I’m sure that at one time or another you’ve all witnessed or been affected by what I like to call “the TV Effect.” It’s basically the phenomenon that if there’s a TV turned on, people nearby will watch it, even if it’s something unimaginably stupid and boring, like that one show where two families switch houses, redecorate them, and switch back. A recent example that comes to mind was when Michelle and I were over at Andy’s house to study for a genetics quiz. Basketball was on. I hate basketball. So does Andy. So does Michelle. Yet we were all watching it, to the point where it interfered with our studying:

ANDY: Hmm, I’m not really sure how to do #5.
BORIS: Well, to find the probability for three traits, don’t you just find the probability for each individual one and then multiply them together?
[here the TV Effect strikes a defenseless Boris]
ANDY: I’m not getting the answer in the back of the book.
MICHELLE: Neither am I.
ANDY: Boris, what’d you get?
BORIS: …
ANDY: Boris?
BORIS: [watching basketball]
ANDY: BORIS! Quit watching basketball!
BORIS: Oh! What? Uh…what problem are we on?

Another incidence of the TV Effect occurred yesterday, when my parents were watching the Academy Awards. I personally find the Oscar business mind-numbingly dull, but whenever I passed by the family room I would become frozen in my tracks, mesmerized by the latest interminable thank-you speech or the random series of movie clips. Actually, I probably would have ended up watching the whole thing except my parents have this ingratiatingly irritating habit of hitting the Mute button whenever the commercials come on. Somebody’s really gonna have to explain the logic of this habit to me. The whole point of watching TV is to not think, and preferably also to not move. Muting when the commercials start and un-muting when they end requires way too much thought and muscle movement; TV is supposed to be a time for your brain to take a break. And there’s a logical gap. If you mute the commercials to avoid watching them, YOU STILL HAVE TO WATCH THEM!! Otherwise, how will you know when the show is back on?? I have the same problem with those annoying people who switch channels during commercials: what possible gratification can you get by watching three minutes of another show, especially considering that throughout the entire duration of those three minutes you will be ill at ease and your brain will be anything but shut off, thinking constantly of the show on the other channel and hoping frantically that you’ll remember to switch back before the commercials end?

Anyway, the muting thing. I can’t take it. With my parents muting the commercials, there’s no way I could have sat through the four or however many hours of Academy Awards presentations. The silent ads would have been doubly irritating because in the case of the Oscars, akin to the Super Bowl, the commercials are by far the best part. Let’s be honest — does anybody REALLY care about most of the stuff that goes on at the Oscars? I especially hate the announcement of the winners. After presenting boatload upon boatload of stupid crap that has nothing to do with the Oscars, they FINALLY get to the Best Picture, and then what do they do? Announce the nominees and say the winner. Bam, five seconds, they’re done. People deserve to be shot for making anticlimactic endings like that. I mean, this is the part that everyone has been WAITING for. Couldn’t they do something special? Couldn’t the final award be punctuated by, oh, I don’t know, a live 1000-man orchestra performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture replete with cannon and machinegun fire? And then amidst the chaos everybody would leap to their feet, form a mob, heave the winners atop the arms of the crowd, and charge the stage, whereupon they’d drop the victorious crew near the mike with their clothes ripped and their glasses broken. Or something like that. Instead they take a cue from The Price is Right and show the winners clambering out of the crowded audience and making their way over to the stage, which is supposed to be dramatic but in fact gets old really quick. Another thing that gets old really quick is how none of the winners have prepared thank-you speeches. If you’re nominated for an Oscar, WHY wouldn’t you take five seconds of your time beforehand to prepare a nice, short speech?! Sure, the chances of you actually winning are small, but do you really want to have the memory of the crowning achievement of your life followed immediately thereafter by the memory of you making a fool of yourself in front of millions of people with a dry, overly long speech in which every third letter is punctuated by UH or UM or WOW I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS?

So getting back to the story — I didn’t watch all of the Academy Awards, despite the overpowering TV Effect. But I did hear most of them, because when the TV is on in our house, you hear it EVERYWHERE. I didn’t catch any of the commercials, because my parents muted those, but I did pick up a good number of speeches and winners from the comfort of the computer room, where the computer was blasting the living tar out of me in Hearts. One of the speeches stands out in my mind, and if you watched the Awards, you can probably guess which one it was — the thank-you speech Michael Moore gave upon his receipt of the Best Documentary Oscar for his film “Bowling for Columbine.” Though you probably shouldn’t call it a thank-you speech. Sitting far away from the TV and not paying complete attention (Hearts requires a lot of concentration, you know), I wasn’t alerted to the fact that something weird was going on until I heard loud boos emanating from the TV. What could possibly make an Oscar audience boo?, I thought. If those idiots will applaud for gaudily overdressed actresses wearing sixteen metric tons of mascara who get up there and gasp like beached carp and then personally thank, by name, the entire populace of Liechtenstein, then they’ll applaud for anybody, right?

Nope. Though supposedly some people stood up and applauded (according to a now-gone Yahoo news story), many of the audience members became pissed fast when Mr. Moore decided to use his thank-you speech as an opportunity to denounce Bush and the war in Iraq. The loud booing continued all the way through Moore’s mercifully short speech, and then the fruity Academy Awards trumpet music came on to signify the commercial break as though nothing had happened. My parents dutifully hit the mute button and I thought, “Ha ha! I bet he’s never gonna get an Oscar again!”

A short while later, when I had taken enough punishment from the computer at that incredibly stupid but unbelievably addicting little card game, I decided to go to bed. My parents, who have a TV in their bedroom and could easily have finished watching the Oscars there, were nice enough to instead stay in the family room, which is separated from my bedroom by a thin wall that is about as soundproof as bubble paper is bulletproof. Just because their only son was going to bed didn’t mean that he wanted to do something as silly as sleep. Surely what he really wanted was to have the rest of the Academy Awards thunder in his ears for half the night! Their obsessive commercial muting was a nice added touch: during each silence I would think that it was all finally over, but then…BAM!! LOUD FRUITY TRUMPET MUSIC!! WAKEY WAKEY! Here come more speeches! Yeah, that was quite a fun night.

But here I go again, wandering down bitter side paths and straying from my story (you do know that there's a story in here, right?). While listening to the rest of the murderously boring speeches that would have been blissfully soporific if only they weren’t so goddam loud, I heard another one that I found really interesting. It was given by some old-sounding lady who was presenting the Oscar for Best Song. It was all mushy and patriotic and stuff, splattered throughout with heart-wrenching sentiments that made the audience applaud. She concluded by saying that she was “proud” and “honored” to live in a country where “everybody has the right to say what they think.” Whether or not any of her sputtering jabber had anything at all to do with the Best Song was a dubious matter, but the audience applauded nonetheless, and to me, the applause was very hypocritical. The right of free speech — these people applauded the sappy, senile woman who praised it, but earlier had booed off the stage the man who had actually exercised it. What gives?

Exhausted after making an observation that used up my entire month’s supply of Insightful Thoughts rations, I grudgingly listened to the rest of the stupid awards ceremony in a half-comatose state and then at last lapsed into sleep.

.: posted by Boris 7:40 PM

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