Can you go a week without streaming?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 15, 2024 – On the street, if someone names something dope it means they like it. I’m afraid, however, that it hardly makes sense to refer to street slang anymore, because, except for places that lure tourists, there are so few people on the street, and nearly zero kids in sandlots and playgrounds.
Sandlots and playgrounds were full-to-bursting during my postwar childhood and adolescence. I spent hundreds of Saturdays outdoors with my best friend, until TV put me in my place. TV presented him with an alternative to yet another day outdoors with me. The future showed up one Saturday afternoon when I was eight and my friend told me he wasn’t going to come outside and play because he wanted to watch a baseball game on TV.
Whenever it was accurate to call something you like dope was after the time when it was au currant to call cool things ‘the bomb.’ I’m going to freeze the dope locution in amber because of the delicious double entendre it represents.
Both a cool thing and an addictive substance is TV, which means TV is dope and it is a drug that destroys people by fooling them into feeling OK, when they are not OK. TV first wounded my eight year old self, then went on to devour so many imaginations that, on the verge of my 76th birthday, the prospect of America surviving her 250th is both bleak and fraught with peril as our faux fuhrer promises another taste of hell.
Our faux fuhrer is partially the product of TV, the rest he inherited from his father, who was a genuine Nazi.