Do you watch television?  Almost all of us, at some points in our lives, do.  Some watch it every night, hour after hour, while others watch it primarily on weekends, catching football games, and still others tune into it for special shows and programs.  Or all three.  Either way, the television has become rather ubiquitous in most lives, be it in the affluence of the West, where we see people walking out of Best Buy and Costco with 72 inch screen monstrosities, to the most rural hinterlands of Romania, where the barely brick and wood homes of a gypsy village in which I taught a number of years ago sprouted any number of satellite dishes rising into the sky, looking for a signal.

     For better or worse, television is everywhere.  I thought about this a bit as I recently read the obituary of Bob Shanks, a former television executive who pioneered the idea of the early morning talk shows to which countless millions of people now tune every day.  His timing proved highly prescient:  today, talk shows dominate the airwaves, coming on at all times of the day or night.

     In The Cool Fire, one of the books he wrote, Mr. Shanks said this about television, "Television is used mostly as a stroking distraction from the truth of an indifferent, silent universe, and the harsh realities just out of sight and sound."  It's quite an indictment, really, of television, the human psyche, indeed, the entire cosmos.  If television is in fact just a distraction from an absolutely insouciant universe--and the random and unpredictable existence that this implies--we may well wonder why we're even alive.

     If life is to live and die and be no more, is it really life at all?