Could there be a better way to end such a surreal year?
It starts tomorrow, New Year's Eve, at 6 AM and runs for three and one half days on the SyFy channel. Here is the schedule. Two I won't miss tomorrow morning:
9 am: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine
9:30am: Escape Clause
Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed. Me, I've seen 'em all, multiple times each. The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. Back in aught-nine I offered my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.
The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.
The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four-pack-a-day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.
But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary or Obama Yomama or any latter-day leftard to decide.
I confess to being a fan of this TV series many of whose episodes are now over 20 years old. I have seen every episode numerous times. I am not a student of the series as I am a student of the great Twilight Zone series, but then numerous episodes of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, belonging as it does to the Golden Age of television, really are worthy of study.
What do I like about Seinfeld? Perhaps it is the utterly zany quality of the Jewish humor. Here is some of it in Yiddish (with subtitles).
And the political incorrectness I like. But things have changed in America, so much so that Jerry Seinfeld nowadays refuses to perform before college audiences.
Indeed, it must be jarring for a boomer like Seinfeld, who went to college in the early 70s, when students were debating real issues freely, to confront today’s college campuses, where students often invent issues about which to be aggrieved, many times on behalf of other parties, and then have to find "free speech zones" in which to discuss them.
Consider the uproar over a statue of a man talking to a woman at a Texas college, which some decided was a depiction of "mansplaining," or a man patronizingly explaining something to a woman. Paul Tadlock, the 79-year-old sculptor, said the piece — done for 20 years before its offense was "discovered" — merely depicted his daughter, a student at the time, talking to a friend.
Then there were the students at UC-Berkeley, who called for "an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities," which sounds serious. Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret felt aggrieved that a classical philosophy course had the audacity to cover actual thought leaders from classical philosophy, including Plato and Aristotle — because they all happened to be white men.
And earlier this year a male student at Portland, Oregon’s Reed College was removed from the discussion portion of his freshman humanities class for questioning the statistics on college sexual assaults and challenging whether or not there is such a thing as a "rape culture."
Why on earth would a comedian like Seinfeld, whose career has focused on humorously pointing out absurdities bring his act to such an utterly humorless and incorrigibly politically correct setting?
By the way, ever notice the similarity between these two guys?
The semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon starts New Year's Eve morning and runs for two days on the SyFy Channel.
My eyes glued to the set, my wife invariably asks, "Haven't you seen that episode before?" She doesn't get it. I've seen 'em all numerous times each. Hell, I've been watching 'em since 1959 when the series first aired. But the best are inexhaustibly rich in content, delightful in execution, studded with young actors and actresses who went on to become famous alongside the now forgotten actors of yesteryear, with their period costumes and lingo, making allusions to the politics of the day. Timeless and yet a nostalgia trip. A fine way to end one year and begin another.
Too hip to moralize, Rod Serling was nevertheless a moralist whose 30-minute morality tales, the best of them anyway, set a standard unsurpassed to this day.
To see how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of one of these episodes, see here.
Schedule here.
The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.
But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.
It is appropriate that on Independence Day one should celebrate with Serling, WWII paratrooper, anti-statist, defender of the individual.
Serling knew how to entertain while also stimulating thought and teaching moral lessons. Our contemporary dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
I've been watching old Alfred Hitchcock re-runs from '63 and '64. I must have seen some of these as a kid, but I've forgotten them all. On the night of 10 August I saw "The Magic Shop." What struck me was how similar in theme this is to the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life."
The very next morning I checked to see if a Twilight Zone episode was airing on the Sci Fi channel. There was, and it happened to be "It's a Good Life." So that is the coincidence, and you can make of it what you will.
Hitchcock is good, but he can't hold a candle to Serling. Rod Serling's 1959-1964 series was and is TV at its very best. The best of the episodes are inexhaustibly rich especially 50 years later. They provide an insight into the speech patterns, the mores, the sartorial habits, the politics, and the cinematography of the day. More importantly, many of them are morality tales that convey important moral truths and life lessons. Serling was above all a moral teacher. We have nothing like this on TV today. What we have are endless quantities of degrading garbage.
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