Wasn’t television supposed to be The Universal Storyteller? Back in the 50s when televisions were the sizes of refrigerators and Univacs were the size of three room houses… television…. It was so promising wasn’t it?… education for everyone, the egalitarian programming of television would become ‘the electric storyteller’… a set of endless wisdom books inside the box.

Like a book, the many leaves of Television would magically flutter open, coming to life across the screen by simply plugging the cord of the mysterious box into an electrical outlet.

We would be engaged by Television.
We would be educated.
We would be lifted
and we would learn useful
and important things.

…but the reality was, we would become television’s roadkill, and yet, as though television were an electronic drug, we would become zombie-ized by television at the same time, increasingly being led around by its timing, not our own, its demand that we be present before its one glass eye at the appointed time, night after night.

Regarding ‘brainwashing,’ it is advised that to disturb the captive’s sense of time, to disorient them accordingly, is the direct way to control them.

As TV programming deteriorated into ‘son of clone of the already cloned’ many of us began looking like Death driving a sofa through the living room whilst eating saltines and peanut butter… and watching a pale blue glass screen flicker in time with our heartbeats. We found less and less jing in the deal.

Why did those in charge of content think we could never get enough of the TV spilling out insulting women who surely seem to have stingers growing out of their rear ends … and their poor husbands who are ever harangued about being too slobby, inept, stupid and disorganized… and their children who appear to be pretenders to the throne of ‘tiresome scathe.’

Did we ask for that, really?

Really? If your mother keeps making you cheese sandwiches for lunch even though you say you don’t like them, can it really be said you are colluding in your own aversive reactions?

Yes, many argue, there are still some ‘good’ ‘things’ on television. True. But why do so many people ‘browse without buying.’ Click click click. Like the ‘full-but-empty-refrigerator’ syndrome: Open the door, look, lots of food, but nothing to eat. Close the door. Open/close, open/close. Nada, nothing.

Whatever there is left on TV that is ‘good and nourishing’ seems like the thinnest tiniest sliver of delicious food in the midst of shelf after shelf of tin pans packed with white lard.

How can that be, when humans are the most inventive creatures on the planet? Who’s methodically annihilating artful imagination? And at what age, and in which places? And who are the volunteer stranglers? Who are the real marauders, by name?

Yet, I hope we can be encouraged about the return of a storyteller for our times… for I remember this one crisp and clear event one night about a year ago that told me the new Storyteller of our Times is near. I was watching the evening news on one of the alphabet networks. The camera panned in on the well known news commentator who was sincerely acting as though he’d just discovered primal fire.

His discovery? YouTube. He’d never heard of it before, and he was marveling over this tiny film clip, creative and fresh, made and uploaded by ‘a citizen.’

I remember his colleague’s remark on air in response, and especially the panic at the edge of his voice as he said completely outside of his usual helmet-haired persona, “There go our jobs.”

It was one of those moments where you could read the newscasters’ thoughts as though they were written on their foreheads… they had just realized they were witnessing the slow motion implosion of an era… their era that had grown so cloistered. They realized in that instant that they were not standing at the cutting edge, but at the long-dead and brackish center.

But this so-evident turn in the road, is not a time of celebration but one of caution. For as promising as television began, YouTube now too proceeds in such promise. But the same temptations, bypasses, detours, shortcuts, twisted ambitions in some, and mal-appetites will also show up and try to calcify, appropriate and hobble what is now so very free and alive.

So maybe, just maybe as YouTube incubates inside the various corporate uterii at Google– despite Viacom trying to force a miscarriage by kinking the blood flow…a blood flow that has in the past, before lawsuits by Viacom, depended on only the slimmest portions of Viacom’s TV content, such as a minute or two of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report… that surely such ‘flow’ could be arranged by simple agreement—

…and if all governmental and cablecast types are not allowed to carve up the Internet ingress and egress into fiefdoms as they’ve carved up television media… and if we remain vigilant about those who are plotting at this very moment to claim the entire moon as their very own just because they deem it so…

then we will have kept a refuge for one of the major story-givers of our times. Think of it, a storyteller that is one of the most huge proportions and the most inclusive EVER known to humankind… a carrier of stories that flows outward from a flickering blue glass screen too, but this time carrying real passion from its many creators to find and fill their many one-of-a-kind patrons…

just like the bards of old … traveling overland with just a staff, a wineskin, a bindle bag, unimpeded by boundaries, telling to whomsoever without qualifying them or ourselves first, engaging whomever has need or want, whomever is hungry for any one of the 6 billion stories in this world that carry real jump, real meaning, real moisture… after decades of eating dust.