Mark America

Will the one-click lifers even notice?

I’ve made no secret in the past about my feelings regarding Tucker Carlson. I viewed him as a spoiled brat who’s had his sobriety issues, and he’s entirely a creature of the swamp. Carlson has claimed in recent years to have reformed, and while that may be true, I must admit that once burned, I’m slow to return to a position in which trust will be offered again, if ever. I think my disdain for Carlson hit its high point when he referred to then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the “supreme commander of milfistan.” I had to look it up. I’d never heard the term MILF before, and frankly, from that moment forward, I considered Carlson a purveyor of filth and slime posing as a journalist. On the surface, by the time he was brought on for Tucker Carlson Tonight, he seems to have reformed himself, but with a mouth like that, I’m going to require some convincing. Did he ever apologize for such things? Part of the reformation process is to seek forgiveness and to atone for past transgressions. Did he? I have no idea.  This is why for me, despite the fact that Carlson has been saying some very interesting things since taking over the 8pm Eastern slot on FoxNews, I’m not willing to watch that network.  You see, they began their betrayal of conservatives some years ago, and on the 3rd of November 2020, they consummated that betrayal.  Oddly, a large proportion of their audience was too thick-skulled to notice.  This is why I believe Fox News won’t see much harm from getting rid of Carlson.  After all, they were already going to take a bath due to the very strange settlement of the Dominion case, so adding Carlson to this was a relative drop in the bucket.  Most of their audience, too lazy to learn how to use devices like ROKU or similar, will continue to lap-up their thin gruel because it’s too much trouble to learn a new technology that’s been around for half a generation now.  Fox News won’t be hurt because too many in their audience are lazy, and FNC knows it.  They bank on it.  They expect them to be shallow and forgetful, but they’re not alone.

If this sounds like a criticism of the audience of Fox News, you’re right, but it’s not just Fox. A large number of the 45+ audience is just too damned intellectually lazy for their own good.  They still watch CBS news every evening, or NBC, or ABC, or PBS, or naturally Fox, not because they prefer it over the alternatives, but because they’ve NEVER SEEN THE ALTERNATIVES and worse, don’t want to.  These are the people who abhor any change, even change for the better, and they’re the people who are driving this country directly off a cliff.  It’s not that they’re too stupid to understand how to use a streaming device.  It’s not that they don’t have Internet connections.  It’s that they’re so change-averse and so comfortable in the same old habits that they’ll go to their graves still pining for the days of Walter Cronkite and all the other crypto-communists who delivered them the news for decades.

It’s not that they have any malice for the country, except that they despise change to an unnatural extent.  They’ve sat in a chair at the same place at the same time looking at a screen located in the same relative position in the room, and gee, it’s only been five years since they got this new TV and they still don’t know what all the buttons on the remote do.

“There’s that one I pressed by accident that one time, has some green logo that says “Hulu” on it and I couldn’t find my damned programs for two days.”

Don’t laugh.  These people exist, and some of them read this web-page occasionally.  I heard from them in droves eleven years ago when I moved this site onto a separate platform from wordpress.com, because by gosh, they had to change their saved hyperlinks, and that always takes them “half a damned day.”  Of course, in truth, even that crowd grudgingly made the change, but there is a broad and inflexible element in our country, and in every country, that detests change so much that they’ll do anything to avoid it.  Just wait until they discover electric charging stations and the new Hell that’s going to inflict on their lives.  Wait until they find out they need a digital health pass(vaccine passport) to use their new Central Bank Digital Currency and that they’ll only be permitted to spend it where and when they’re told.  They will initially flip out, and then they’ll passively comply.  They may hate change, but they hate friction even more.

This is why Fox News will continue pretty much as before.  The people described above like putting the TV on one channel and leaving it there, in perpetuity.  They don’t want to be forced to think or choose or discriminate among a myriad of options, including many better alternatives.  That’s just too damned much friction.  I would pity these people, but for the fact that they’re dooming the lot of us.  They won’t go to a damned school board meeting, or a county commissioners’ court, or a congressman’s town hall, or get involved in much of anything.  They’re like conscious vegetables.  They consume content, but produce very little of their own.  Most of them barely make a grunt most days.  They won’t challenge their own alleged political party, because that would mean friction, and we damned-well know how they feel about that.  If the Republicans tell them they won’t put Trump on the ballot in various states, these people will accept it.  If the election is corrupted, they won’t say a word.  If there is anything that causes them the slightest discomfort, they’ll surrender.  Meet the bulk of the Fox News audience.  It’s no different than the bulk of the CBS audience.  Or the NBC audience.  If it requires more than a press of a power button, they don’t want to know about it:  Too much friction.

These are and have been the people truly destroying America for generations.  They’ve watched, mostly in silence, except perhaps to their spouses seated beside them, as Presidents have been murdered, removed, and defamed.  They’ve watched as soldiers are sent into bloodbaths that have served no purpose but provide them another reason to look away from their screens.  They’ve watched as we’ve gone from normalizing homosexuality to the brink of normalizing pedophilia, and still, they watch mostly in silence, but unwilling to act lest an action create more friction.  They’ve watched the politicians for years vote away their money into the abyss of another black hole in a bureaucratic agency without batting an eye.  They want not merely to be left alone, but they want to be left alone so badly that they’re willing to see their lives stripped from them in payment of the privilege.  Freedom doesn’t matter to this sort.  Freedom requires effort, and that’s more damned friction, don’t you know?

As your civilization collapses, don’t wait for these to be roused from their living graves.  They’re already dead, and that’s why Fox News isn’t worried.  It’s why even in the longer run, Anheuser-Busch will make a complete recovery.

  “Buycott?  Sounds like more damned friction to me, Mabel.”

Or:

“Streaming service? Now I have to learn how to use another remote control and worse, the full functions of the one I already have?  Two remotes? Henry, how can you expect me to do all of that?  Can’t we just watch Fox News?  I miss that Tucker fellow, but that Kilmeade guy seems okay.  He’s a bit humorless, but I can live with him.  Dan Rather didn’t have a sense of humor either, after all.”

While some will assume it’s a question of age, that’s only partly the issue.  You see the same thing in some younger folk, but it seems to be the tendency of humans as they age to seek the state of lowest energy.  I’m not immune to this either.  The problem is that the lowest state of energy a human can attain is ‘dead.”  I tend to agree with Dan Bongino when he says “Don’t get dead,” but it seems the first death happens between the ears, then in the soul, and finally in the body.  Too many Americans numbering among the technically living have already assumed either the first or second state of death, and nothing much seems to faze them.

This is why Fox News isn’t worried, but neither is the GOP establishment or the DC Mafia.  These one-button-lifers will never discover there had been an alternative, and they’re just fine with it.  Don’t count on these people.  Don’t expect them to act.  Even as the mobs burn their homes to the ground, they will sit there in disbelief, wondering why anybody would cause them friction.  You see, the source of the friction for them is anything that requires them to think and to reason.  They don’t like to be in the position to rely upon their minds, and it may not even be because their minds are inferior, but simply because thinking is hard.  It requires a kind of discipline they’d just as soon not be compelled to practice.

Many will be quick to point out that I’ve repeatedly made reference to the fact that I avoid popular culture.  This is true.  I avoid it because it tends to clutter the mind with too many meaningless things.  The one way in which the popular culture provides any use to me is that on occasion, it’s a short-cut to understanding, for instance in comparing something observed in a movie to what might be seen in real life: You can describe that movie scene and people will understand its application because so many of them will have seen it.  I try not to rely on this very often, because on the one hand, I have so completely fallen away from popular culture that any references I’m likely to make are dated and particularly among the young, will be pointless.  Also, I recognize that this is a lazy way of communicating an idea, and while very effective in some instances, it is nevertheless a shortcut that should be avoided.  In short, I’m willing to spend the time thinking about it.

This is not true for our one-button-lifers, who will probably be the death of us all.  I’ve tried many times to rouse them from their one-button dependency, but it doesn’t seem to work.  Even if I can convince them to try something new for a day or two, maybe even a week, they quickly return to the comfort of their single button.  In a few cases, it causes them to change the destination of the single button, but it doesn’t modify the habit.  I once wondered how one might convince a crazy person to change their actions in light of their craziness.  The sad answer is that you can’t.  I view the one-button-lifers as another form of crazy, albeit expressed in a different way.  Perhaps there is some rational argument one might make to them such that they change their habits and thereby change their lives, but I’ve not discovered it.  In the end, my observation has been that once they get to the point of soul death, there is no chance of saving them.  They no longer care to be saved, and are simply waiting for the final, physical death.  It’s sad to watch, but it’s sadder still to know that we depend to a degree on these people to help us save our country and our world.  We should have learned by now that there will be no help from that quarter, but we should also recognize that the Fox News Channel and all the other undying media outlets of the world rely on this same habitual one-click living.  They’re not worried.  The so-called “Deep State” isn’t worried.  They know.  One-click lifers are the most reliable people living on Earth; Democrats know the only votes more reliable are no longer among the living.