Greetings from TV Fest, Part III
Year 3 was a year of major changes for the TV Festival. I had long vowed to Aaron that the event would leave Des Moines the day that Mary Cheney got pregnant, but Aaron was persistent, and finally he convinced me that Cedar Rapids deserved a chance to host. (It would be a badly-needed shot in the arm for the local economy.) For the life of me now, I can't remember why we also changed the season of the festival from spring to late autumn. I think we were just too lazy to have it organized by May or June. In any case, it made practical sense to move the weekend to one that would be less likely to conflict with people's desires to be out in the fresh air. (Fresh air is like kryptonite to a TV Festival.)Here are our program "greetings," year 3...
2004- November 13th and 14th, Cedar Rapids, IA, 10 people in attendance:
Our story begins in 1995, when I was fresh out of seminary and my brother was working as a photojournalist with National Geographic. Both being fluent in many native Bantu dialects, Chris and I were asked to take part in a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe, working to learn more about historical links between the present-day tribes and ancient Lemba tribes from neighboring South Africa that may have occupied the region many years ago.
We came to the area with many hypotheses and an eagerness to see how the tribal culture had evolved in the intervening centuries. What we found instead were locals curious about American television, and more specifically, the role that twins played in that history. The change this brought about in the direction of our studies led to our groundbreaking thesis entitled "Behind the Goatee: Representing the Evil Twin in American Television."
Being members of an under-represented minority group has not been easy for Chris or myself. Growing up we were forced to acknowledge society's bigotry and ignorance, and nowhere was this more evident than across the television spectrum. Twins were often shown as having comically identical personalities with indistinct individual qualities. Sitcoms were rife with comical situations of characters getting fooled by "wily" twins that were not to be trusted. Twins, long known for their skill as child actors, were also often cast as the same character to avoid giving separate roles to hardworking sets of twins. One particular set of twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, were used, abused, and exploited until they had eating disorders. When my brother and I were appointed co-chairmen of the Twin Anti-Defamation League (they wouldn't even give us our own chairs), we adopted Ashley and Mary-Kate as our spokespersons. They are the Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth of our movement and we dedicate the 3rd Annual Moeller TV Festival to them.
Thanks for showing up,
Aaron Moeller
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Dear friends,
Did you know that Osama bin Laden hates television? Hates it BIG TIME. Hates everything about it. He doesn't own one, and he won't watch one. He lives in various caves so that he won't come across one by accident. If he ever did come across one, he would probably blow it up with a suitcase bomb or cover it up with a turban or something. I don't know exactly what he would do.
He hates sitcoms, reality shows, and crime scene investigation shows. It's very likely he couldn't even distinguish between those types of shows. He probably wouldn't know the difference between "Meet the Press" and Press the Meat. (Remember that old joke?) If he ever saw the shows "Friends" or "According to Jim," he would hate them. I don't know if it's the actors he would hate, or the scripts, or just what exactly. You know what? It doesn't even matter. He would simply hate them... and the television set that projected their images.
It might be that when he was young, a television, television show, or television technician harmed him in some way that still causes him to suffer psychologically. Maybe his lack of understanding about it, or lack of exposure to it, brought about feelings of insecurity and/or inadequacy. Maybe he hates it because, under hypnosis, he was ordered by an unethical hypnotist to start hating it.
He sometimes appears on television. He makes speeches on tape and then they show the tape all over the world. If I were one of those television guys, I wouldn't show the tape. He's only using them to help recruit more people to his radical, "jihad"-advocating team.
If Osama bin Laden called Aaron and asked if he could come and hang out at this year's TV Festival, I hope Aaron would tell him no. Television festivals are for people who truly like television-- not people who hate it, but still use it as a recruitment tool for their radical, "jihad"-advocating team. Probably, he wouldn't even come because he hates television so much.
Chris
posted by CM @ 5:25 PM
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