I loved watching TV when I was a kid. Cartoons, sitcoms, dramas, it didn’t matter to me. I was enthralled by how it all came together.
“Looney tunes” was one of my favorite cartoons, particularly Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Because it seemed like no matter how patient, or persistent Elmer was at hunting down Bugs, he was always outsmarted, and made to look like an idiot, time and time again.

The best shtick of it to me, (and definitely the most bizarre), was just how easy it was to fool Elmer. I mean here was a guy, who hunted, and tracked down the same rabbit everyday for years, knew what he looked like, sounded like, and even knew a few of his tricks. But yet, throw some lipstick, fake eyelashes, a corset, and a bonnet in the mix, and he was in love. True comedy. Ahhh, the good ol’ days…

I don’t think I would be alone in saying, that on top of everything else we’ve been dealing with as a nation in current years; we’ve had a major values breakdown as well.

Values, and entertainment are so mixed up, that they are now interchangeable, like a special edition sponge bob square pants action figure.
Television is perhaps the single biggest influence on American families today, introducing many different flows, or trains of thought into each home. And with the Department of Education suggesting that young adults watch as much as 4 to 5 hours of TV a day, they didn’t have to look too far for role models.
Whether it was watching celebrities fall off their rockers, and slowly lose a firm grip on reality, or watching them participate in illicit acts and reckless behavior that was rewarded rather than reproved, the admiration and reverence we once had for television and film stars, was now a full-blown obsession. And that obsession; was now the catalyst for pop culture.

Every gossip magazine, blog, or website that promoted any rumor they got, and adopted the “bad news sells and good news doesn’t” politics, dangerously developed habits in their consumers to become harsh critics, and often inspired negative energy towards the featured person of the month, whom personally, we knew nothing about. Hate transitioning as the new love, seemed to be the way of the future.

I didn’t know if it was because times were getting harder, or if it was just a progressive bandwagon people were hopping on, but any media site, or video I’d come across where people could express their opinion, most comments didn’t vary a whole lot from the one before it. And it didn’t seem to matter what it was.
I imagined it could be a young kid who rescued a box full of kittens from being run over in the street, and someone would say something like, “Dumb kid thinks he’s Captain America or what?” Or, “He probably wants to keep them so he can throw them off the roof.” In the midst of these, there would be a few good comments about the valiant act, and how the boy was a hero. I wondered why that was?

Did everyone who logged onto that site secretly have dreams of being a famous comedian? Following in the footsteps of an Eddie Murphy, or Jerry Seinfeld, and was just testing out new material? Or had people, simply become more negative over the years? I imagined it could be something incredible, or unbelievably amazing, and people would still find a reason to spew venom about it. Now I was born at night, but not last night, so I knew that as long as there were individuals walking the earth, there would always be varying opinions. But the optimism, or general postivity of years past, was not just lacking, but also rapidly fading away.

The upcoming generation had been put under a spell of false reality, that everything was ok to do. Being justified with the attitude of, “C’mon, get with the times, it’s the year (insert year here), everybody’s doing it”. With convictions like right and wrong, and morality and immorality far and few between, there seemed to be no real consequences. But if the emulation of entertainment was mesmerizing more and more of the youth, then that means the industry itself, waved the wand of control, and had the power of influence to determine what path we went down as a society. That’s scary.

We went from being one of the highest educated countries, to one where entertainment dominates all aspects of our culture, including the news.
Sure entertainment is meant to be a form of escapism from life’s problems, but what if we never came back from that escape? What if we were living in a coma like dream with no one nudging us to wake up? Or in my cousin’s case, pouring a cold bucket of ice water on our faces.
Was art still imitating life…? Or was life, now imitating a false reality entertainment?

There have always been many forms of entertainment going back to the Roman Empire. But I couldn’t help but wonder, were we ever going to evolve from the phase that we were currently in? Or was entertainment as a whole, going to burrow further into subjects that deal with the lowest parts of the human soul? Does a thing like questionable subject matter exist anymore? Or was everything thrown into a jumbled free-for-all box of artistic expression? As a childhood fan, I felt like Hollywood, was beginning to lose its unique charm and mystique.

By: Theodore Borders