a la carte

I have substantially the same conversation with someone different every couple of months. I'm going through the twists and turns in my history with and without cable television and explaining how my life is both better and worse in my present cabled or uncabled state. It's rather pathetic, moreso because I go to great lengths to talk about what a struggle it is for me. I can't help it; I have this irrational fixation that apart from all the other comits and omits I've authored, I'll have to face on the Last Great Day some ledger which tells me how much elapsed time I devoted to "Fantasy Island" in comparison to that which I devoted to reading Dostoevsky. Anyway, at some point in the rote conversation I or my interlocutor will say, "It's such a shame you can't just pick the channels you want. I could really do with [five, ten, fifteen] channels."

So I'm sitting in a chair on the beach back in June, reading a copy of Businessweek that was lying around the beach house. I stumbled across this story and couldn't help but laugh heartily. Really, could you have imagined a more hilarious consortium of anti-competition? I won't be able to not-want my MTV, and apparently I have Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson to thank for it.

What's funny is that my reasons for seeking to limit my cable channels jibe pretty well with Robertson's agenda of excoriating cul-too-ral degradayshun. For my sake and that of my wife and daughters, we could do without the stream of sadistic violence and vertically-shaking rumps and sleb worship and shout-down news and whatever is being passed off as programing by the people at E!. And, yeah, I know that among the channels I'd enthusiastically add to my plate I'd get different kinds of nothingness and low-end culture, but at least I'd have more direct culpability in choosing it. But Robertson knows what I know: despite the fact that I'm a Christian and a large plurality of the country similarly self-identifies (at least according to those Gallup polls), I/we would not pay any amount of money to have his cable channel piped into our living room. It just isn't any good.

Unless, of course, we were interested in watching the endless cycle of two-stepping, in which Robertson makes some indefensible statement or another and then spends a few days denying it or claiming misquoting and then a few more days apologizing and clarifying. That might be worth something.

Robertson, for his part, would likely offer some justification for his lobbying efforts rooted not in personal self-preservation, but in advancement of the Kingdom of God. CBN's continued free-riding and the anti-competitive measures necessary to keep it so are worthwhile just because it provides one more outlet for people to hear the Word of God, he'd argue. I'm not going to be the one to put a dollar figure on eternal salvation (I'll leave that to the televangelists), but I would like to see a tally of how much lowest-common-denominator, spirit-killing prepackaged masturbational fantasy Pat and the other 699 members of his Club are willing to stick us all with in order to continue evading the marketplace.

What I cannot abide: self-proclaimed capitalists who don't really believe in capitalism.

ADDENDUM 8.29.05: I intended, but plainly forgot, to address the first half of the article, in which it is announced that the same coalition will continue to agitate, through FCC-applied pressure and other means, to control the content of cable channels directly. We can wonder whether this is because direct-mail campaigns are so much easier to sell when the phrase on the outside of the envelope is HELP US STOP CABLE FILTH NOW rather than MAKE CABLE TV REFLECT THE ACTUAL VIEWING PREFERENCES OF THE SUBSCRIBERS.

Oh, and this makes two anti-competitive efforts spearheaded by Reed. Combine this with that deal a few years ago wherein he was lobbying for a Christian group who opposed the expansion of gambling in Alabama (again, a political stance which I think has merit, at least in theory). At some point in the effort, an infusion of cash was needed, and somehow a pile of money fronted by the Choctaw tribe ends up in the anti-gambling coffers. The Choctaw, of course, owned casinos in neighboring Mississippi and preferred not to have to compete with Alabama casinos.

What these two events add up to is this: if some sort of multi-era crossroads of time allowed for a meeting of Adam Smith and Ralph Reed, Smith would extract Reed's heart from his bony chest and eat it in front of him.