TVNZ 7: Freedom has a Price.

I’m going to take a big breath and say it: I liked TVNZ Channel 7. I understand from what I have read about the ratings, and despite what the save campaign say, on some of their programming it may have only been me watching. But it was possibly some of the best programming, for me, outside the Food Channel. Emily Perkin’s ‘The Good Word’ show about all things bookish was one of my favourite spots of the week on our TV.

And let’s get this whole sordid confessional over.

During the day when I’m working I am normally streaming Concert Program or BBC3 – currently listening to the Early Music Show as I pen this. I listen to a lots of the arts related slots, especially books and writing, on BBC4; I listen to a lot of Kim Hill’s interviews via podcast; and in a nauseous orgy of state broadcasting I’ve started listening to National Program’s Checkpoint at 5.00pm over Larry Williams on ZB, and I even – face palming, ashamedly looking through the frost chapped cracks in my fingers - have been known to listen to Jim Mora for an hour or two.

Woe is me. Woeful am I. Losing TVNZ 7 hurts.

But this said, I do not support state broadcasting. Why? Read every other post on this blog, that’s why. Freedom is a package deal: I can’t just pick those parts of the big state I like, and ignore the rest and the fact the whole edifice is based on a theft enforced by the police state powers of tax enforcement, and thus the truncating of liberty. And yes, persecuting rich pricks, more than they already are, so I can watch The Good Word, is immoral. So instead of philosophising on the last rites for TVNZ 7, I would like to point to something that has been missed in the debate – that is, why is commercial TV so awful? Because there’s a connection.

I suggest it’s because after so many decades of Gramsci in our state school system, and the dumbing down that has occurred, there’s a nihilism – as in gaggle - of unemployable youth being churned out, barely able to speak intelligibly anymore, and commercial TV, to survive, has to generate its revenues off the scary menace their minds have become: thus, as this generation would txt, our welfare mentality, reality TV has become ‘a bit shit’. The crap that is commercial television, merely represents our age of crap that has been begot of the welfare state, which has replaced the creative, free individual, and his pursuit of happiness, with the collective ascendency of a coke swilling, binge drinking moronacy of barfing idiots. And as I’ve explained, already, I don’t believe this is fixable anymore, as the philosophical rot is seventy years deep.

The only question left from this is why not, then, grab onto that which is good, as in uplifting for the secular soul, anymore, no matter it may be served up on taxpayer money. Why not turn a blind eye to the persecution of the rich pricks, who are most likely uncouth businessmen who wouldn’t know Shakespeare from Shakespeare’s Sister anyway? Right?

Well I once posed the following question to Lindsay Perigo on his SOLO site; what if lack of regulation, say, of fisheries, led to fisheries being depleted, possibly wiped out? His answer was that men acting in their self-interest would probably not do this, but it was possible, yes; freedom has a price. And he’s right. For me, the price is no TVNZ 7; I have not participated in any protest online or off. As much as I love that channel, I would rather have my freedom, than be reading Shakespeare in a Gulag, even if I say this from the depressing vantage point of knowing I will never be a free man.

PS: Mr Dotcom, yes, I saw you on the funeral march: quite apart from all the ironies involved, what Sky channel was TVNZ 7 on? …. Yeah, I thought so.