Watching television, as we know, is both a colossal, soul-destroying waste of time and completely unavoidable if you want to know what people are like today. There are two kinds of viewers. First, you have the cable viewers. Watching cable television is like a rehearsal for dying, your choices are so misleadingly vast that channel surfing is like stumbling in a desolate wilderness replete with shimmering mirages, like being exiled in the desert beneath circling vultures. Watching cable, in other words, is like being under a death sentence or stricken with a terminal illness. Broadcast television, on the other hand, is death itself. Watching TV without a cable or satellite hookup is literally being in death, you are a denizen of the void, a specter.

Also, of course, there are people who eschew television altogether. Their numbers are so vanishingly small, however, that they don't even count. In this way they are like American atheists, or the butter-churning Amish. Interesting, even admirable, but statistically insignificant.