Smoking Is Bad, Reading Is Good

We were
watching an insipid situation comedy the other day while correcting essays,
and we saw an actress in a "typical American family" yawn and say to
her daughter, "I’m bored, lets go to the movies."

We couldn’t remember the last time that situation had come up in the
Dowbrigade household. But what struck us was that despite the fact that
people in the situation comedies were always doing something,
eating or talking or playing games or choosing clothes or moving in or
out, they were never, ever, reading.

Was this, we wondered, because the TV industry still feels itself locked
in a struggle-to-the-death with the written word for the eyeballs of
America? How else to explain the almost complete absence of one of life’s
most elemental activities.

In the Dowbrigade’s world, everybody reads. We carry reading material
with us wherever we roam, ready to cop a quick chapter, or article, or
essay between periods, or on the train, or waiting in line at the post
office. On the Boston subway, everybody is reading, usually a novel,
and a quick ride on the Red Line serves as a quick read on what’s being
read on campus.

Is the rest of America really as lexaphobic as TV-land would have us
believe? According to a recent
study by the National Endowment for the Arts, 47% of American adults still read literature (novels, short stories,
plays) and fully 57% read books of any kind. Not exactly numbers to be
crowing about, but enough that they ought to be represented in the public
figures and role models we see everyday on TV.

We have also been following the rash of recent articles on product
placement an increasingly popular form of marketing that isn’t
quite advertising, like the Coca-Cola cups casually strewn around the
on-set table in front of the judges in  American Idol, or
Donald Trump knocking on the doors of the Mattel Corp.  Come to
think of it, Donald Trump is product placement in and of himself.

What kids especially see on television can profoundly affect their behavior
later in life. Why, thanks to Andy of Mayberry, our preferred methodology
for going fishing is to tie a piece of string around an old branch we
find on the way to the fishing hole. No matter that we haven’t caught
a thing in 40 years of trying.

The TV industry has shown that it isn’t above using its influence to
affect behavior.  Look at smoking.  When we were kids, half
the characters on TV smoked, including the cartoons. Between the programs
, Joe Camel fought it out with the Marlboro Man for the hearts and lungs
of America’s youth. Now smoking on air is verboten, and the
entire habit is being excised from the American character and consciousness.

If TV can agree that smoking is bad, can’t they come to a consensus
that reading is good? Show people carrying around books, reading at odd
moments, discussing stories and ideas they had read? It’s not as though
they would need to make it up.  People do read.

Of course, they had financial motivation to put the kabash on smoking.
Medical costs from smoking were threatening to bankrupt the healthcare
and insurance industries. In this rare case, the interests of a major
US industry parallel the interests of the majority of the population.

The hospitals and insurance companies wish that everyone would live
to a ripe old age and then die quietly in their sleep, and we second
the motion.  This would avoid costly long-term care as hearts and
lungs give out in bodies that otherwise have a lot of miles left on them.
Their model citizen never sees a doctor, never takes a sick day in his
entire life, and dies suddenly and painlessly. Hear, hear.

But we would argue that reading is as essential to American success
and security as smoking is a threat, and that encouraging a cult of reading
will make Americans better workers, more informed consumers, and more
capable participants in the democratic process. Of course, that is assuming
that this is in the interests of the powers that control TV.

Smoking is bad, reading is good.  Lets see more of it on TV.