Djelloul Marbrook

If you watch too much television you start dreaming about the scorned ex-lover of a victim’s fiancé and soon realize your life needs a continuity editor. Not that it matters because your advertising support is weak and your Nielsens are in the toilet. There’s no chemistry between you and the beautiful people whose misfortune is to be cast with you, and the script writer has confused you with her ex who’s sleeping with the female lead. Your situation is complicated by your need to make a living and your having one of those faces that always look as if you’re about to say the one thing nobody wants to hear. What situation is that? your snide shrink asks. Fire the joker and try to imagine a world in which nothing has to happen until it happens and even then it’s an illusion, a world in which no breath mint helps the glib. If you watch too much television your dreams become identity crises. The forensic evidence suggests you’re the crime. Your list of who needs killing is worth more than a hundred visits to your shrink. The hideous cackle which alarms your wife and kids is one more side effect of the many drugs designed to kill you before your time. You find yourself dreaming about the avuncular if somewhat robotic doctor reciting what could happen to you if you take this latest wonder drug. This is your American Idyll. Who would have thought a flickering box could turn you into a cynic in your own home, casting shadows on everything you hold dear, poisoning the shrubbery, scaring you half to death, boring the other half by instilling a dread fascination with all you can’t afford to buy and yet know you must to defend the American way of life, support the troops, hold back the red tide or whatever hue the dread du jour is these days? Do your patriotic duty, max your cards, support the insurance industry, vote for Big Oil, kill the bastards, never mind who they are, they’re the only resource that will never run out, the bastards and all the elephants in the room. —DM