A common criticism leveled at Baby Boomers by members of younger generations is that trying to change Boomers’ minds with dialectical reason is like hitting your head against the wall. This intellectual stubbornness is summed up in the meme “When you’re arguing with a Boomer, you’re really arguing with the television.”
The Baby Boomers’ status as the first generation raised by television lends a lot of practical weight to that assessment. But a couple bits of esoteric lore that have been floating around the ineternet suggest the possibility of another darker dimension.
Since the invention of mainstream radio and television, billions of watchers and listeners have tuned in for a dose of entertainment and education. But just imagine watching your favorite TV show or listening to the radio suddenly interrupted by a strange broadcast or a mysterious message. It will definitely leave you confused and uneasy. Well, there have been many such cases over the years, but today we will discuss one such strange case that happened on 29th August 1968, when all the TVs In America suddenly went off for about 25 seconds, leaving behind such a sound as if it was the voice of a devil, making it the scariest thing that ever happened to America.
It occurs to me that one way to define Clown World is the point in time after which every TV going out is no longer the scariest thing to have happened in America.
But I digress.
On August 29th, 1968, every single TV in America suddenly shut down and for 25 seconds, people have heard a voice, a murmur. No one seemed to understand what the issue really was and what the sound was from the TVs. Many people believe that it was the devil trying to convey some message but nobody really understood it. After 25 seconds, all the televisions turned back on and the daily scheduled programs resumed. To this day, no one exactly knows who caused it and why it happened but everyone believed it was the work of the devil.
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The story above has been debunked as an urban legend by Snopess, for what that’s worth.
But it does make another association in my mind with one of the more cryptic and chilling prophecies attributed to a saint.
Elizabeth Ann Seton was said to have had a vision of the future, in which every home in America had a black box that could let the Devil in.
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Again, is the account of the Devil speaking through every TV in America for 25 seconds back in August of 68 literal fact?
Maybe not. But if the events that have unfolded since that date are any indication, the urban legend is a 100 percent effective metaphor.
So keep in mind, when you’re talking with someone who grew up in front of the television, to some extent, you’re talking with the Devil box.
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Another way you could look at it, is the phone screen, or the computer monitor, given what horrors the internet will show you at a moment’s notice. Then again, one could make the argument that it simply reflects the nature of the people using it, and given what one can say about the fallen state of human nature, it would all work just as well.
To make a silly pop cult reference: the internet is like the Warp from 40k. Full of demons but an unavoidable and vital utility to operate in modern every day life.
As per previous discussions and without defense to TV-addicted Boomers, many devices such as smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, MP3/radios, and smart screens are topologically “boxes.” The Devil likely has many more boxes in addition to TVs to use in his assault upon Humanity.
I was going to say “cable modems” or “broadband routers” could be the black boxes in question. They were usually made of black plastic or metal – before ISPs started branding them, at least. They’re still black boxes in the sense most folks only have a vague idea of what goes on inside them. While I’m not convinced the Internet is demonically infested, I’m also not convinced it isn’t. I would not rule out the possibility portions of it are infested now.
Not to rule out the possibility that St. Elizabeth’s vision may have concerned PCs, smartphones, etc. (prophecies can be polyvalent), but parsimony would dictate that the warning referred to something nearer her time (early 19th century).
And while the digital revolution has indeed wrought deep and widespread degradation, the tipping point of societal collapse happened under TV’s reign.
No reason Seton couldn’t have been talking about TVs *and* routers *and* phones.
My post-hippie parents threw out the TV before I was born. I never had one. It was a curiosity I encountered at the homes of friends and grandparents. Coincidentally, they are way easier to chat alternate interpretations of current events with than, say, my also-boomer inlaws who are 100% programmed by their TV. I think they’re the only people I know who still watch CNN, and if you contradict CNN with facts… you’re some sort of kook.
With that for context, I always found it weird… not just casually weird, but majorly, pathologically weird, the reactions people had when they found out we didn’t have a TV. People would offer to give us one, as though financial hardship was the only reason they could think of to not have one (I think the decision was actually made after observing my older sibling’s compulsive, zombie-like behavior toward the box). They’d try to sell us on their favorite TV programs, even though talking about those programs only made them, and the programs, sound really dumb (you have no idea how monumentally idiotic it sounds when you try to talk up “Seinfeld” or “Friends” to a family of bookworms. My Dad taught me to read at three, using the first chapter of Ecclesiastes in the King James and discussed Solzhenitzyn and Von Mises with us on car trips). Then people would try to convince my parents that we were being socially and culturally stunted because we didn’t have access to the mass culture all the other kids did. What could we talk about with other children? Excuse me, but f**k that. The kids who couldn’t talk about anything but whatever they’d watched on Nickelodeon for 20 hours this week were basically braindead zombies with functional IQs of 100 or less. We could always find common ground with kids who watched Saturday morning cartoons and spent the rest of the week doing actually interesting things.
I used to have same-age friends in the two houses behind ours. Let’s call them Stacy and Joan. I remember the year the TV ate Stacy. Before that, we rode our bikes together all over the neighborhood, were constantly at each others’ houses, played pirate adventures that ranged all around our adjacent backyards. And then Stacy’s family got cable, and she got her own TV in her own room. She was so proud of it, showed it off to us. We saw her, briefly, a handful of times after that. Always on a short leash, as the next favorite show began in 10 minutes and she couldn’t miss it. And then we didn’t see her at all. She disappeared. I’m not sure she ever went outside again, of her own volition.
Joan and I puzzled about this, tried knocking on her door and inviting her places. No dice. We couldn’t compete with the box. Joan’s family was the Saturday-mornings-only type. TV for them was a boring grownup thing, indulged in sparingly, and only after the kids were in bed. They were a different kind of post-hippie family from ours: summer vacations meant weeks-long canoe trips, or backpacking in the Appalachians. Camping in national parks. Joan never once tried to sell me on a TV program– that was only something to pass the time while her parents slept in on the weekend. She had *much* more interesting things to talk about while we played 4-hour games of Monopoly and plotted our next bike adventure.
I’ve continued the tradition with my family. We have a TV ($30 at a thrift shop), but it lives in the garage, it gets no channels (no antenna), and is hooked up to a DVD player so that once every 6 weeks or so, we can watch a movie, weather permitting. And I see the same thing with my kids: yes, they have a bit of trouble finding common cultural ground with some of the neighbor kids who clearly spend most of their spare time hooked up to a gaming device or a TV screen. And that’s OK, because they seek out, and preferentially spend time with, intelligent kids who have similar low-electronic-media, high-literacy home cultures. Mostly kids they meet at church. That’s… great! I didn’t have to guide them or cajole them or admonish them in any way about their choice of friends. It happened organically because the TV-and-videogames kids are *boring*.
I heard from a guy once, who’d set up a booth at a local festival of some sort, many long years ago, equipped with some old junk TVs, and a couple of sledgehammers. You could pay a dollar to have a go at a TV with a sledgehammer. They had a line for the booth all evening, and raised a surprising amount of $$. Which suggests some interesting things about how people *really* feel about the boxes, vs. how they *say* they feel about them. I wonder what results you’d get these days, if you set up a similar booth, but with defunct smartphones. I think you might be stunned by the repressed rage people feel toward these devices.
Is it a creepy pasta? Well, it certainly functioning that way now since everyone is spreading the same narrative without giving any evidence or source for the claim. However, that doesn’t mean that there is no basis for the story since there are plenty of creepypastas that track back to reality. For example I’ve seen people spread a creepypasta about a game Helious made by aliens as though it had no connection to anything, but Helious is a real game and the designer did claim that it mysteriously appeared on his hard drive after an encounter with aliens that involved missing time. More to the point, there are many creepypastas about TV hijackings, with some being 100% true (some people spread the Max Headroom incident without realizing that it is very real and well documented), with others being dubious urban legends that predated the creepypasta, and yet others obviously made up by the creepypasta author.
In this case what makes things tricky is that if such an event happened, it would only be preserved through word of mouth. VCRs didn’t hit the market until the 70’s and the cameras used for home movies generally wouldn’t film sound until the 70’s, unless you were a movie making pro or a wealthy enthusiast. I suppose that since the only thing the story mentions is sound that those sounds could have been recorded to a reel to reel recorder or an early tape recorder, but even if such a tape exists it would be hard to associate it specifically with this event (who would have a recorder on hand and ready to set up within the 25 seconds of the event? Remember, most TV hijackings were caught on tape because either they interrupted a show that someone had set the VCR to tape, or later were only recorded on a smart phone that the person would have been holding and likely using already.)
So if the event is real, the only way to establish this would be to find accounts of the event dating back to 1968, or at least people talking about it not too much later, like in the 70’s or 80’s. Such an account, if it exists, probably is only going to be found from a contemporary book or newspaper article. There might be references online, but even if search engines didn’t suck they would be almost impossible to find due to the amount of discussion of the meme. I doubt you’re going to find it in 1968 newspapers though, since the date of August 29, 1968 corresponds to the final day of the DNC convention, which had ended in riots. Though I suppose another way to go about this would be to ask leftist relatives who were alive at the time and who would have been following the DNC convention.
I once read a poem about TV entitled “That One-Eyed Devil with Its Tail Plugged into the Wall.” I cannot find it online, and thought it was over the top back then, but it did make a good point that parent’s let the TV say things they won’t let their kids say.
It’s like having an open sewer in your living room. No idea why people not only tolerate it, but set up the whole communal space of their houses around it. That’s not an entertainment center, it’s an altar, and clearly the center and focus of the family’s life.