Flutterby™! : Modern MASH 2011-02-02 21:55:30.985579+00

Modern MASH

2011-02-02 21:55:30.985579+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

There's an old Jordan Shelbourne story called Virgin (On The Ridiculous) that has this exchange:

Cliff was sitting there on his bed, propped against his wall, surrounded by three empty mickey bottles of rye. He was staring at a MASH rerun on a little color television. I turned it off. "Hey!" said Cliff.

"You've seen it," I told him. "It's the one where Hawkeye complains about the inhumanity of war."

And it got me to thinking about the modern equivalent to MASH. Is it The Simpsons? Friends? Or are we beyond that?

YouTube: "You've seen it," I told him, "it's the one with the cute kittens."
Wikileaks: ... "it's the one where the State Department needs to grow a spine, and the resulting revolution puts an unfriendly government in power because of the U.S. government's lack of principles."
a 4chan channel: ... "it's the one where the people trading unspeakably disgusting porn turn out to be decent human beings who pull together for the betterment of humanity."
Facebook: ... "you hung out with them in high school, and they've got kids now. And getting back together with her would be a bad idea."
Huffington Post: ... "it's the one where they're outraged about Fox news."

Or maybe it's not net based at all. What's your take?

Boing Boing: "It's the one where half the entries are about hand-carved hard drives, and the other half are about how without Net neutrality we will be forced to use AOL."

The Simpsons was it in the 90s but should have been put to bed a decade ago. I think the real problem is that our attention has been spread across so many channels. When MASH was new and relevant, everyone watched the same 3-5 channels. The same shows were shown on those channels. There were no outside distractions from those channels. The kids may have been playing Atari but the adults were watching Hawkeye slowly go crazy.

And I won't even delve into how "reality TV" somehow has become reflective the way MASH once was. There are probably too many painful realizations hiding in there.