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In Your Face!
In each edition of The BookSense.com Newsletter (sign up here!), Len Vlahos, director of BookSense.com, holds forth about various topics...

The Opiate of the Masses
March 11, 2002

The title of this column paraphrases a quote from that most dour of the Marx Brothers, Karl. Contrary to popular opinion, it didn't appear in his seminal work, The Communist Manifesto, but rather, in the introduction of his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Either way, Mr. Marx, who wrote in the 19th Century, was speaking of religion when he penned that now-infamous line. And while I get his meaning, it seems to me that the opium of our present-day masses is a far more sinister drug: television.

How many of you -- be honest -- turn the television on as soon as you get home after work? Eat dinner in front of the television? Leave the TV on until it's time to go to bed? What about when you're away from home? I saw it written somewhere that the first thing most people do when they enter a hotel room is to turn on the television.

This mind-melting device has made us a nation of drones (I'm including myself in this group, too.). It's uncanny how many of our experiences in life we relate back to what we saw on television. As in "my friend Andrew breaks up with each of his girlfriends for the dumbest reasons. He's just like Seinfeld." Or how the word "D'oh" (Homer Simpson) has entered the common vernacular. Or how many married couples see their relationship in terms of the couple on "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Malcom in the Middle," or worse, "The Sopranos."

It's as if we supplant our own lives with those of the characters on our favorite TV shows. As if our own existences are so devoid of meaning that we have to live vicariously through the fiction we see on the boob tube. And why are our lives so devoid of meaning? BECAUSE WE'RE WATCHING TELEVISION ALL THE TIME! See, it's just like a drug.

Books, however, are a very different sort of experience, and escape. Television leaves nothing to the imagination, and generally, it speaks to the lowest common denominator. Sure, there's good TV, and sure, there are bad books. But even the worst books sharpen one's imagination. And the best books…they challenge, edify, and inspire in a way that television simply can't.

I'm reminded of this after having read the first hundred or so pages of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It was recommended to me by my boss, who lauded it as one of the best books he's read in the last 10 years.

Having only read one-sixth of this rather massive tome, I'm not yet in a position to make that claim. But I will say that I am totally hooked. I find myself stealing every minute I can to read more. I even find myself turning off the TV.

Why don't you close your Web browser, grab the remote, and do the same? And yes…read a book! You know, something other than wasting time in front of that idiot-box.

Think I'm an idiot who should be put in a box? Broadcast your opinion at inyourface@booksense.com and perhaps we'll publish your response on our website.

• Responses to Len's last column on Duping: The Lit World's Answer to Doping

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