Blow up your TV

Here is a chorus from an old song by John Prine (later recorded by John Denver):

Blow up your T.V. throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a homePlant a little garden, eat a lot of peachesTry an find Jesus on your own.


Well last month we spent 10 days on an electronic fast--no television, almost no radio, no internet, no newspapers. It wasn't as hard for me as I expected. In fact, it was rather wonderful.

The "electronic fast" was imposed by the wildernesses of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and Glacier National Park in Montana. There is only very spotty cell phone reception in these parks; the same with internet connectivity. We probably could have had some radio reception, but we left the radio off. And in the parks we had absolutely no access to television.

So we didn't exactly "blow up the tv," but we might as well have. I don't hate these electronic media. But i realize that they can hook you and hurt you. Human beings lived without these things for, say, 200,000 years. We don't need them; we shouldn't be slaves to them.

"Blow Up Your TV"

"Blow up your TV

Throw away your paper

Go to the country,

Build yourself a home

Plant a little garden,

Eat a lot of peaches

Try and find Jesus on your own"



Thus goes the chorus of John Prine's song "Spanish Pipedream." This past week we sort of blew up our tv. What we did was this: we got rid of our cable TV.

The first day without television was eye-opening. I hardly knew what to do. I ended up reading a bit of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, The Lacuna. Then I played my guitar and later my Irish whistle. Later I went to the piano and pounded out the few songs that I know. And then back to the whistle and the guitar. At some point I turned on the radio, NPR in Cleveland, 90.3 FM.

I started thinking what life in Geauga County, Ohio was like before television, which probably arrived here in the late 1940's (though reception was probably not good this far from Cleveland). And then I wondered about life before radio; that must have arrived in the 1920's. And electricity, which gradually came in the late 1800's and early 1900's. And the automobile, which probably didn't get here in any great numbers until the 1910's and later. Widespread telephones probably spread to Geauga in the 1900's to the 1920's.

An odd thought occurred to me. Right now, in 2009, we have thousands of people in Geauga County who live without most of the above--the Middlefield Amish (the second or third largest Amish community in the world). Now the Amish have very strict rules and mostly follow them faithfully (though like Catholics, they find creative ways to get around the rules). So you will see Amish people in their horse-drawn buggies--getting Big Mac meals at the drive-through window at McDonalds. Or Amish boys in Middlefield on cell phones.

Anyway, that first day without television was interesting.