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Faster, Stronger, Better. . . Meh (The Six Million Dollar Man)

Faster, Stronger, Better. . . Meh (The Six Million Dollar Man)

Last updated on: May 30, 2016 at 1:24 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Faster, Stronger, Better. . . Meh (The Six Million Dollar Man) 2016-05-30T01:24:35-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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We lost our television in odd circumstances. Daniel and I liked going to church and generally made no trouble going, but this Sunday night was The Wizard of Oz. There was no streaming in those benighted days, no ability to pop in a Blu-ray. If you missed a show, you missed it.

I saw the Star Wars Christmas Special once so I can assure you that even then you could not unsee what you had seen.

In any case, we wanted to see Dorothy, so we asked to stay home. My parents were always good souls and said we could, though I think they were disappointed in our priorities. As they prepared to go, I turned on the television to let it warm up.

It blew up like a cartoon of a television blowing up with smoke and sparks.

This meant something, perhaps.

When we finally got a television back, we turned on the television to hear this:

Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.

We were not hooked, because even then we knew that the show was . . . implausible? The long break from television had left us reading books, playing outside, going to Barterra, and it took time to get hooked on the Tube again.

Perhaps we should not have bothered.

What we did not realize at the time was 1970’s television had horrific pacing: reaction shots, followed by explanations, followed by reaction shots. To watch an episode again (Big Foot versus Steve) is to realize that things have gotten better in TV-Land over the last thirty years. We live in the golden age of television where the best of the past, and the worst of the past (ElectroWoman and Dynagirl), is available on YouTube.

Yet despite the improvement, I wonder. Maybe it would be good for our televisions to blow up if we are tempted to replace human interaction with a screen. Programming is better, stronger (language!), and faster . . . but we are not better men.

It turns out that it is easier to make more entertaining television than it is to make better people. The introduction to the Six Million Dollar Man had him rescuing a hostage in the Middle East so that we could avoid war and bring peace to the region.

Sigh.

What is wrong? Just as Steve Austin is not a better man because he is stronger and faster, so the world is not better because our entertainment is faster paced. We can consume video more quickly, enjoy plot complexity, and have awesome power to simulate reality.

Reality still operates by the moral law and the moral law does not require strength or speed. It is not entertaining and the pacing of justice is very slow: as slow as God’s inevitable judgments, but sure.

I like television . . . or video . . . whatever you call the stuff on the screen now that the networks are dying. There is good to it just as there is good in novels, but just as a man can disappear too far into Trollope or Tolkien, so we can delude ourselves with television. Forget amusing ourselves to death and instead worry that we are making ourselves faster and stronger consumers of entertainment, but not faster and stronger moral agents.

Our video capacity is off the charts, but our moral sophistication is lacking. Is there a correlation? Perhaps, moral reasoning requires dialog even slower than a 1970’s drama and more than three reaction shots. What if we don’t even have that much patience any more?

Do we want to do something too quickly?

I don’t need my screen to blow up to caution me that I should not live my life in virtual reality, because as an adult, I can choose to talk to my friends instead of simply consuming entertainment.

We can be better, but faster and stronger is not the way . . . especially when it comes to entertainment.

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