By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — In between the endless stream of loud commercials attacking incontinence, leaking, psoriasis, erectile dysfunction, bad cholesterol, mood disorder, computer romance, toilet stains, and bankruptcy, American television programming is clearly narrowing its themes to the basic, divine two: Sex and Death.
These two categories are the bookends of the Bible, the streak marks of religion, so the theological television titanium is just the prelude to the ultimate late-night chatter fest coup: Letterman or Fallon or somebody is going to smugly announce: “My next guest is God.”
Don’t laugh: God will be a has-been guest when the first test-tube genetic human will double-talk his/her way into hosting “America’s Cutest Clones.”
What’s going on? Why is what used to be truly funny prime-time programming degenerated into just desperate bathroom humor pasted across cookie-cutter plots or formats that remind you of a discarded condom?
We’ve dissolved from the boredom into the biblical and it satisfieth us not.
Here’s why: We’ve more or less run out of gadgets to upgrade, cyber bridges to cross, social modes to out-do, and we’re even sated with outrage—and the places to vent. In short, there are no more mysteries; there is nothing we can’t Tweet about and no secrets about celebrities to expose and evaluate.
To the point: we are stone jaded and the only thing left that is still unsolved or unrevealed is God Almighty. Until we get Her cell phone number. Meanwhile, short of God actually revealed, we dissolve from commercials about the plague of irregularity to the apocalyptic themes of coitus and murder—not unlike the Book of Genesis.
What’s behind the trend?
I seriously believe that one element, implied above, is the fact that we already own, operate, and dispose of everything else. We can voice-dial our lover in Brazil while operating our Lexus in New Jersey. The end of basic human imagination on earth has a way of bringing us back to imagining heaven.
The other element is, frankly, the complete sea-change in our feelings of security and quietude instigated by 9/11. Never feeling safe again, we have slipped into social evangelism and moral righteousness.
The current Star Trek climax-graphics of a mega starship crashing into the San Francisco skyline betray nothing short of our galactic obsessions and fears set off by what real airborne demons did to physical buildings and actual persons on September 11. We want God to intervene but until that happens, we just bandage our anxieties and service our prayers with Captain Kirk, Batman, Iron Man, and, every few months, Superman.
Faith-skewed material lends itself easily to the box-office because it loves high-tech visuals, feeds on the deep dreads a lot of folks don’t even realize they carry these days, and we’ve already seen everybody’s butt and breasts being exercised on television and the movies.
The only thing left, the only mystery, the only nourishment for human curiosity, is what God thinks, wants, expects, disdains, or loves. It’s all here for several bursts of black and white smoke. Surf the channels or wait for the sequel.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com