Dear Cable Company,

Please excuse me for annually asking you to send a technician to upgrade my service from a “limited-basic” menu of twenty-one channels to the still-merely-“basic” package of seventy-five, and then a few months later recalling your cable guy, always a different one, to climb the telephone pole in my back yard and block those special channels to allow my return to limited-basic sanity. As you know, I have never been so manic as to request your “standard” service of more than two hundred channels, which I’m sure many people watch and enjoy.

Now, you may say that no one is forced to even turn on the TV much less watch more than a channel or two. Regrettably, that’s like telling people to fill their homes with pies and cakes but never take more than a bite. I can’t do that so don’t keep sweets around. I’m not as addicted to the tube as to sugar but concede I’ve had some problems. The principle difficulty has been that you offer all Los Angeles Lakers games as well as those of their hometown mates the Clippers, and sometimes, instead of writing or reading, I’ve been watching too much basketball, though naturally not whole games that would expose me to intolerable levels of loud and degrading commercials. Even viewing only the final quarter, after getting home from weeknight teaching, undermines discipline and torpedoes much independent work. This character weakness is certainly mine since I alone elected to watch young Blake Griffin dunk and clutch rebounds for the still-struggling Clippers rather than turn on my computer, the word processing portion rather than ESPN.com where I’ve also burned time scouring NBA box scores. Football would also be problematic but there are fewer games and they’re concentrated on weekends when I have the leisure to record a game and later fast forward past commercials and other inanities that undermine action.

Proudly, I can tell you I generally haven’t been tempted by your horde of other basic channels. I’d heard enough to understand that television is making viewers insipid and, let us concede, insipid viewers are encouraging television to offer garbage; it’s like abusive couples who’re forever in love. Before sending you this missive, I felt obligated to watch at least one such program and chose Sarah Palin’s Alaska. This edition began with husband Todd and their celebrated daughter, Bristol, and three girlfriends going to Grouse Ridge, a skeet shooting range, where Sarah grabbed a rifle and fired a profundity: “This’ll get the liberals all wee-weed up.” I doubt most liberals mind that Sarah’s a contemporary Annie Oakley and so demonstrated by nailing a catapulted orange bird.

Afterward the Palin party piled into a spacious motor home, Todd driving and Sarah riding shotgun, and headed for the sea to stalk halibut with a commercial fisherman. Sarah noted her family is part of that profession and Alaska provides sixty percent of seafood consumed in the United States. That’s a lot of oceanic protein and perhaps would be even greater if the queen of the outdoors hadn’t deserted her already-boring job as Governor of Alaska. Lucrative opportunities beckoned, and we shouldn’t blame a potential president for leaving a peanuts electoral commitment and, instead, going before the camera so she could kick back in her mobile home and tell people that Bristol is “organized” and other daughters Willow and Piper are, respectively, “wild” and “innocent and awesome” and that quiet and smiling Todd was the four-time Iron Dog champ, outracing everyone two thousand miles across snowbound Alaska. After about ten miles most viewers, including this one, would’ve dropped out with frozen asses.

The Palins really are a nice family, albeit dramatically too light to occupy the White House, and many viewers probably enjoyed seeing Bristol’s cute son hold a big hamburger while Sarah cooed. She soon addressed a serious issue – let’s henceforth call her the Gravitas Grandma – solemnly stating they always visit fisherman’s memorials and that Mother Nature wins.

There had already been several assaultive commercials, and now it was time for the Bama Belles to appear. I clicked off the TV and wrote, “That’s all I can take.” I’d feel the same about shows featuring Paris Hilton and monster truck announcers and Jerry Springer and Glenn Beck and numerous others who revel in and profit from telling you that you’re an idiot.

Please notify your technician I’ll be home around one p.m. Friday.

Sincerely,

GTC