The Affluence of Despair By Ray Bradbury How come? How come we're one of the greatest nations in the world.. and yet, there is this feeling of Doom? How come, while our president walks wounded, we ourselves jog along nicely, but ...under a dark cloud that says something awful is about to happen? How come, with 500,000 immigrants a year yammering to flood in ...we enjoy what could be described as The Affluence of Despair? America today: We wonder how we look at this hour, what we feel this minute, what we're imagining now. So we switch the television on. How do we look in the 80 million-lensed TV eye on America the beautiful? Did you catch me last night confessing what I caught and what caught me? Recall Starbuck's advice to mad Ahab? "Do not fear me, old man. Beware of thy self, my captain." America should beware of itself. Today, we are everywhere loving to be watched. My God, look, I am on Channel Nine! We do not suffer from totalitarian lunatics, but from the astonishing proliferation of our images. We perform for ourselves, not Big Brother. We have fallen in love with mirrors. Flash a camera and your merest broccoli-headed citizen morphs into Travolta or Madonna. And all of it on local TV news, in 15-second disaster updates. Breaking bones, breaking news, at 11. "Tell us, Mrs. Guiterrez, how's it feel with your son shotgunned minutes ago?" We do not go to the theater, we are the theater. We have invaded the TV studios and run the country to mania on talking-head shows. We display our brilliance on "Jeopardy," forgetting that its factoids are 90% useless once you kill the set. We don't ask who Napoleon was but where he was buried. Or why he invaded Russia, but when. A friend of mine bragged he had bought a dish that could cup, cull and catch 200 channels raining across a moron sky. Hell, I said, you've just got a bigger windmill to catch more of nothing: O. J. blood here, House of Usher AIDS there, the Killing Fields of America's high roads, each car a glorious pyre to mindless speed. And in every front yard a Mrs. Guiterrez being questioned but watching the TV mirror to see how she plays. Those epileptic souls at football, baseball, hockey matches, who frenzy for the TV camera -- how to end their pantomimes? We the judges and jurors trying, damning or freeing the guilty, weighing topics we're unqualified to answer -- how to cork this motor-mouth? The problem is not necessarily with our national full-coverage news, which can be only mildly depressing. It is with the assault of the local TV paparazzi, who machine-gun you with decapitations, sexual harassments, gangster executions in 15-second explosions for the full half-hour. No attack army could survive that fusillade. Bullets, real and psychological, wound and kill. So we must stand alert, ward off a central core despair, target our Panic of the Week Syndrome, guard against the local TV news seance. Every week, 52 weeks a year, they need a prime disaster focus to spin the garbage and glue the potato people to the tube. Remember the Alar-poisoned apples that the dinner time newsbites claimed would destroy us, so they destroyed some part of the apple industry? Recall the poison cellar gas rising to asphyxiate your kids? Or those arsenic Peruvian grapes promising to strip our gears? Or the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown where nothing melted, no injuries, no deaths? Panic for two weeks, make it three. Ratings up. Morale down. What to do? Leave a message on your local station's machine, describing their stupidity. If you meet their news-readers, tell them that they are overpaid and underbrained. Ask them if it would be too much trouble to air 20-second newsbites instead of 15-second flashes. Think of the extra enrichment! Stop saying that these TV hookers are high-class thinkers. Ask them to give back their fortunes and hand us real news. Instead of treating them as Cinderellas, tell them they are ugly sisters whose lips spew not diamonds and emeralds but spiders, frogs and toads: Each time they open their mouths, they spoil the ecology. We must speak to these confessors of our dark souls and tell them that their awful truths in awesome repetition end with the Big Lie. We are not as bad as they say we are, but we feel this despair because they have somehow won us over. The bottom line is that if you stare like stunned deer in mid-road, blinded by the lights that rush to run you down, you must expect that 1,000 such nights will convince you that the end of the world is at hand, that America is bestial, and that suicide, murder, rape and AIDS are our lot. We have condemned ourselves. Now we must save ourselves. No one else can. Shut off the set. Write your local TV news people. Tell them to go to hell. Go sit on the lawn with friends.