Why The Revolution Won't Be Televised

Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV;

and you think you're so clever and classless and free;

but you're still f**king peasants, as far as I can see

- John Lennon, "Working Class Hero"

Who Wants to Be a Revolutionary? Oh, there's anger out there! America has got to be one of the most royally pissed off countries in the world. It doesn't matter if you're a leftie or a rightie, if you're an American, there is a good chance that something has got your blood boiling now. It might be stolen elections, Kenyan birth certificates, Katrina, terrorists, bank bailouts, wars for oil, telecom spying, CEO's salaries, religious fundamentalism, misleading food labeling, the slow death of the American automobile industry, the quicker demise of the American middle class or any sordid combination of the above. If you haven't thought at some point in the last ten years or so that things are seriously FUBAR, that the system doesn't work, and that it definitely doesn't have YOUR best interests in mind, then I wonder about you. Where have you been?

Yes, the mood is ugly. It's Tea Party ugly. It's Ron Paul angry. It's the stuff of which revolutions are made, the fire next time that burns like a thousand California wildfires that somebody, no doubt, blames Obama for (and somebody else probably blamed Bush for). Yes, there is revolution in the air!

Except, there isn't. The American people are NOT going to revolt, folks. The country isn't going to split apart either. The country probably isn't even going to sweep a true maverick like Paul into power anytime soon. Why? People are too comfortable! A second American Revolution is no more likely to occur than a rebellion of the brainwashed, mutated denizens of Huxley's "Brave New World", and for the same exact reason. The Powers that Be have got us, folks, right where they want us. Docile, overfed, overstimulated, undernourished and undereducated, and most of all, hyper-entertained. Which has led me to wonder, what WOULD need to happen for Americans to rise up like the Founding Fathers, taking to the streets with eyes blazing and teeth gnashing? Something the Powers that Be would never be so stupid as to do; take away our televisions!

You'd see a revolution then! Without Monday Night Football and American Idol and Jeopardy and Lost and Jay and The Simpsons, without Wii and PlayStation, without commercials telling us what to buy and what meds we need to be taking, people would flat out lose it! You want anger? You ain't seen nothing yet!

And see it you won't. Nobody is going to take anybody's television away. Television has done what no tyrant nor terrorist has ever come close to accomplishing. It has reduced a once proud and powerful nation to a land of dazed zombies, wearing a groove in the rug between the couch and the fridge while their warden, the glowing rectangular object in the Living Room, goads them to ask the question no revolutionary has ever asked; "What's on after this?"