David McElroy

I get varying reactions when I tell people that I quit watching television 15 years ago. Some people look at me as though I’m a alien from Mars. Many, though, nod knowingly and say, “Oh, I don’t watch the stupid shows. I just watch it for news.”

What those people don’t understand is that they’re watching the most dangerous thing on television. If you want to watch so-called “reality” TV or low-brow humor, I might laugh at you, but you aren’t under the impression that you’re educating yourself. You know exactly what you’re getting.

The people who watch the TV news channels, however, are under the mistaken impression that they’re being educated about the issues. They don’t seem to realize that what they’re getting is entertainment in a news format. They don’t understand that “television news” is the ultimate oxymoron.

This is counter-intuitive for most people, who assume they’re doing a good thing when they avoid the “stupid shows” and they instead watch news and similar programming to “educate themselves about the issues.” So why do I claim they’re mistaken?

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I had to drive through a part of Birmingham Wednesday where I hardly ever go anymore. Years ago, I spent a good bit of time in that area. As a drove down a major road, my mind catalogued changes that have taken place in the 15 years or so since I regularly spent time there.

The O’Charley’s that was the popular brand-new mid-priced restaurant in the area about 15 years ago was closed and the building was in disrepair. What had once been a Pizza Hut where my ex-wife and I used to spend a lot of time was now a run-down title pawn store. A home supply store where I bought live Christmas trees for a number of years was closed and the building was crumbling from lack of use. There was example after example of this along the highway.

I was surprised to find myself feeling a little disoriented from seeing it all.

My rational brain understands that retail buildings are thrown up as cheaply as possible to serve the purposes they’re intended for. If a building needs to project an air of solidity and permanence, the building’s facade might be stone or be made of something else designed to look like something that will last. But underneath, today’s commercial buildings are cheap and intended to be thrown away in just a few years, after they’ve served their brief commercial purposes.

As I looked at those decaying and abandoned buildings, it occurred to me why I’m so strongly attracted to old buildings that are still in good repair and still in use. I find them charming and oddly alluring, wherever I find them. For instance, Hagia Sophia, pictured above, was built as a church in 537 AD. It spent most of its history as a church and then became a mosque. Today, it’s a museum. I’d like to visit it someday.

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Ever since we found out the extent of the NSA snooping in our lives, I haven’t been able to get a 2006 German movie off my mind. “The Lives of Others” follows an agent of the communist East German secret police as he carries out surveillance on a playwright.

The playwright was actually a good communist, so the state started out having nothing to fear from him. But someone in power wanted something the playwright had, so he used the “security service” for his own personal needs — and the state managed to turn the good communist playwright against itself. The details of the story are complicated, and various lives are changed over the course of the film.

I’m not going to tell more of the plot, because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. If you’d like to know more, though, you can read the detailed plot summary here. And I’m posting the film’s trailer below.

It’s not the specific plot of “The Lives of Others” that the NSA snooping brings to mind. It’s more the creeping feeling that some politicians and bureaucrats here are working hard to build a modern version of the police state that the communist East used to be. For those of us who lived through those days and understood that the difference between the East and West was that we were free and they were not, it’s a chilling thought.

Are we slowly becoming more like our former communist adversaries?

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