And Speaking of Lowest Common Denominator...

Despite the fact that I work at home, I don't watch much daytime television. Now, I'm not one of those people that claims to never watch TV, or hates everything that's on. In fact, I'm quite convinced that there's more quality shows on than I have time to watch. For example, I hear the West Wing is great, and of course I'm constantly told how wonderful Buffy the Vampire Slayer is -- yes, that's right, as hard as it may be for you to believe, I don't watch Buffy. I'm sure it's great. I just don't happen to watch it. My loss.

Anyway, the first day of Gen Con, I did not get much sleep the night before, so after my first seminar, I found myself back in my room. It was my intention to take a short nap. I couldn't sleep, however, so I turned on the television. There, before my eyes, was the Jerry Springer Show. For those of you who don't know, particularly those of you who are not in the United States, Jerry Springer hosts a talk show where regular people (not celebrities) come on to talk about their personal problems. I'd seen bits of the show a few times before, and now this one showed some people arguing about something base and lowbrow. (Hey, Southerners, don't you ever get offended that it's always people from the South on these shows?)

It occurred to me that they might really have to dig to find these lowlifes and losers to go on the show. And then it hit me: I bet they do really dig deep to find them, and they encourage them to be just as awful as they can be, but they never tell us that's what they're doing.

In fact, they try to tell us that these people are average or normal.

On what might seem to be an unrelated note, I also don't watch much television news. But this is intentional, and comes from a conscious decision because of the low quality of television news reporting. I once read an interesting report in a magazine that showed that as violent crime goes down in the U.S., and has been going down for years, reports of violent crime on television get more and more frequent.

Do you see what's going on here? They're trying to tell us that the world is a worse place than it really is.

It's a marketing ploy to drum up ratings. Just like when movie ads try to get you to believe some new movie is going to take you someplace you've never been, the news, and talk shows, and "reality" shows are trying to make their topics seem more lurid and exciting as well.

The problem is, these creeps claim to be presenting us with the real actual world outside our window. To get better ratings, they're changing our perception of ourselves. Is the world really full of stupid, violent, sex-crazed people, or is that just what we're led to believe? And is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

All the time, I hear people talking about "these days," as in "These days, kids all have guns," or "These days, it's not safe to walk alone." As if 20 years ago, or 60 years ago, the world was a complete utopia. Right. You don't have to be a history major (although I was) to know that's a load of crap.

Whether it comes from a strong sense of optimism or just an overall cynicism about anything the media tells me, I've just never bought into the whole "things suck now, but they were great a long time ago" thing. That's not analysis, that's nostalgia. When people complain that D&D products aren't as good as back when they were 12 years old and first starting to play the game, my response is usually, "The game hasn't changed -- you have. You're not 12 anymore, and no one can get you back there."

A little look at actual history shows that things are actually not so bad. In fact, they're better than they were in many cases, not worse. There's a sudden downturn in -- but admittedly and unfortunately not a complete dissolution of --ice ages freezing entire continents, plagues ripping through countries with only leeches to save us, entire cities being sacked, raped, and burned, etc.

So don't bad-mouth my world, or my time period. Don't bad-mouth the people who live in my world and my time period. They're all I've got. Maybe 100 years ago everyone was smart and polite and got along really well.

But I doubt it.

I promise, by the way, that the next rant won't have anything to do with the media (which I harp on a lot). Maybe it'll be about toothpaste, or those annoying plastic strips that they use to seal compact disks that are so hard to get off. But that's Another Rant...