The Farce of Human Interest

The upside of funemployment is free time. The downside of funemployment is day time television. I won't come out with a blanket statement about the demographic that watches or is available to watch daytime television on a regular basis, but what I will do is call out the insanity of the supposed human interest story featured on daytime television.

In its thinnest guise it is the paternity specials on talk shows and the daily freak shows created from people with actual problems who somehow think taking their children or families on talk shows will provide some kind of lasting solution to whatever it is that ails them on the inside or maybe just to make a buck and get a tv special pitched at them from TLC. In its thicker, more elaborate manifestations it's the two day back to back experience of the "half ton mom" and the expose' on teenage fight club sex parties and alarmist programs highlighting manufactured cultural tensions and real ones.

And I guess I'm just sick of people calling it human interest. Human interest, the term itself, seems to ask a little more of itself than to simply raise emotion and sympathy and "wow" from the viewer. Human interest should denote a desire or interest to view and understand human-ness or humanity. A term as charged as human interest shouldn't stoop to the ridiculous shallows of daytime television for any reason. Human interest should be about introspection and reflection and I guarantee you the people watching human interest stories are as interested in taking in introspection and reflection as a red head at the beach is interested in taking in an afternoon of sun bathing. Having to be around people purporting to enjoy watching human interest stories is like going to a meeting with 30 yes men. All they're doing is soaking up reaffirmation of their pre-existing beliefs. In the end though, I'm sure that's why the shows are on tv. That and to illicit all of the "wows" and "oh my Gods" from the people that are watching purely for the floor show.

Personally I like to take my entertainment from sports arenas and sit coms. Wow, that sounds snooty. You know what, I'm saying it anyway. It only sounds snooty in the context of the ridiculousness of this modern day reversal. So human interest is an enormous farce that people watch so they can say things and feel connected to problems they don't have and feel a conscience they never acknowledge for the other 130 hours of their week and feel reassured that drugs are bad and teens are dangerous and gangs live in every dark corner of every city and know that they're not so bad because "look at the tv, there're worse people than me." So what.

I don't know. I feel dumber for having brought it up. I suppose the takeaway is: at the end of the day, I just wish we could all stop conveniently naming and pretending and applying euphemisms and have lived with a smidge more awareness of ourselves. I guess it grates me to have to listen to the people that talk to each other and while one rests all they say is "yes" "oh yes" "you know, that's what they say" and then they talk and the other turns into the yes man and by conversation's end no one has actually said anything and no ideas or information has been exchanged. The thing that unnerves me the most is that as personal awareness erodes so does creativity and imagination until the person becomes part of the reciprocating cultural wheel, the ultimate feedback loop, and they're lost as though they never existed.

///Amon Tobin - "Straight Psyche"