Then came Spike TV for men, and I was sure that television people didn't have a clue about what made the difference between a boy and a man. Maybe its because all those people making these decisions live either in New York or Los Angeles. In the former, a man is aggressive and competitive to the point of gross immorality, while in the latter, a man is someone fixed in late adolescence with the worst kinds of passions and virtues one associates with gross sexual and philosophical immaturity.
These people seem to know nothing about life. They know nothing of the suffering at a job that goes no where, and the pain of raising children in an age such as this. They know nothing of the courage that manifests daily in the lives of men in our age - to get up and go to work at a job that one must have in order to care for one's family, even though the stress is literally deadly. I could go on, but I think you get the basic idea.
By the way, this is meant to say nothing of the real lives of women either, but television has certainly lost its way on both counts. Sure Oprah is something special, but most of the television fare is thoughtless in the extreme when it comes to dealing with the reality of life in an honest way. Virtue and courage is everywhere in the lives of ordinary women and men, but you'd hardly know it from a lot of what's on the tube.
What would a real cable channel devoted to men be about? But that question begs another one - what is a man? Someone with a penis? Is a gay man a man? How about the more masculine partner in a lesbian relationship? Maybe the man woman thing is misleading in itself. Maybe the essential question is not what is a man or a woman, but what is a human being? This, more central question, is all the more difficult for it suggests matters not quite a part of our daily conversation. We speak of super bowl winners, and half time depravity, and political races and wars in strange places. But do we ever wonder on the deeper things? What is a human being?
Let this question rest, but remember it stands beneath the question of what is a man, for certainly whatever a man is, or a women, they both are human beings before anything else. And a boy, or a girl, who and what are they? In the Age of MTV, and super bowl half-times laced with un-restrained and fallen sexuality, no adults stood over those events, no human beings in whom man and womanhood stood tall to guide the boys and girls on that stage. And so, we are lent images of wantonness and violence pretending to be art.
Spike TV for men. What is that then, but really another sign of the End of Western Civilization. Neither entertainment (which must be art, even if art for the ordinary), or even an attempt at vice. Spike TV is empty of anything but thinly disguised avarice, by which a commercial enterprise seeks to draw into the snares of advertising the hearts and minds of boy-children. A poor excuse for anything of value and really only something vulgar, like it must have been outside the Halls of Rome, when Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and down in the streets peddlers sold trash proclaiming it was art.
Think on this again. Our politicians play games and the world burns. Small wonder then that in the confines of television, off in the wasteland of cable, there blooms a small weed of little import except some think they can sell it as some illness healing herb. This is Spike TV for men. A sad thing really in a time of upheaval and chaos, where the true danger is that no wisdom can be found in the places where it is most disparately needed.
