Sunday morning getting down

Digby Village Hall, North Kerstevens, Lincolnshire.

Cokie Roberts came up with something. No, really, on a subject she is no doubt passionately interested in, that of who gets invited to Sunday morning talk shows, in the context of Marco Rubio's unprecedented feat yesterday of appearing on seven different programs, which has obviously set certain pulses racing: Chris Cilizza, of the Washington Post's The Fix (Is In) with a video mashup, Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic Wire ("basically every Sunday morning talk show known to man") , and so on.

We-all on the Upper Left Side have our own ways of discussing the phenomenon, based on the well-respected though unproven hypothesis that the Sunday talk [jump]
shows are a conspiracy to destroy the world by polluting it with an unsustainable amount of John McCain. Or at least by making us believe it's normal in some sense to be a Republican, so that we'll just maybe stop fighting it and wander into internal exile or something.

Anyway, Cokie offers another idea: she says the guests, as exemplified by Rubio's championship season here, are the ones who get the ratings.

Bingo! They are what the audience wants to see—12 million crabby old white men who wake up early on Sunday morning but then have nothing to do, don't go to church, don't take care of the lawn, don't read the Times or the funnies, don't make pancakes or popovers or lox and bagels, don't play with their grandchildren or go on Facebook, don't even listen to NPR. The ones Cialis and Cadillac and that horrible reverse-mortgage zombie (say, didn't he use to be a fixture on the Sunday talk shows himself?) are willing to pay for. They are the most insignificant audience in the history of television, or would be, were it not that they include virtually the entire citizenry of the so-called Beltway, le tout-Washington, the people that our Digby immortally named the Village.

Incidentally—this is just occurring to me, I never thought of it before—do you suppose Digby meant to reference that godawful M. Night Shyamalan movie where a bunch of well-meaning parents had attempted to imprison their children in the 19th century, to save them from 1970s chaos and distress, keeping them within the walls of their village by ringing it with fake nightmare creatures of which the young people were supposedly terrified but which were in fact hilariously unfrightening? Do you—Oh. My. God.

Do you suppose that movie was a lot better than I thought it was, only I just wasn't cynical enough to understand? Or alternatively just as crappy as I thought but exactly conveying, by its very crappiness, what was going on?

So I'll try later to get back to the thought I started out with, but I'm stopping for now.

N.B. The horrors in Boston make it necessary to add: the analogue to Shyamalan's terrors wouldn't be terrorists, terrorists are real. I was thinking of our nation's "debt crisis" as the thing the Elders use to keep the young folk from entering the woods.