What You're (Not) Missing On Daytime TeeVee

by Ted Rall

All right, that's not actually true. Big business doesn't know me personally. But the faceless corporate monolith of capitalism unmistakably holds a dim view of those of us who happily pay extra taxes four times a year to avoid three things: a boss, wearing constrictive, itchy clothing, and a boss.

Don't take my word for it. Call in sick tomorrow and fire up the old toob. Ignore the endless stream of talk shows and celebrity interviews -- that stuff is actually quite worthwhile -- and check out the commercials.

Back in the '70s, I was a kid when being a kid wasn't cool, and I was sick a lot. I watched a lot of daytime teevee. The commercials were all for cleaning products and gizmos designed to make the life of the prototypical American housewife a tad less torturous.

My favorite was a spot for a device attached to a long stick that allowed its user to grab a huge icky insect, carry it out to the yard and release the creature without ever having it come within five feet of your body. After 3 p.m., when the wee tax deductions were presumably home watching teevee instead of doing the homework that would eventually lead to a good college, huge student loans and dead-end clerical jobs, the commercials for sugar-coated breakfast cereal came on.

Today the prototypical American female carries Mace to fend off her huge icky boss at the dead-end job she landed after running up a pile of student loans from the great college she got herself into. So who's home now?

Accident victims.

An awful plague of clumsiness appears to be is sweeping the nation -- slips and falls, especially in the workplace, but also motorcycle and plain old auto collisions -- and these mishaps are causing trillions of dollars in potential damage claims against rich people and employers, who ideally are one and the same.

Thanks to our greatest natural resource, legal referral services that aren't really law firms, the cruel unfairness of slips and falls (not to mention medical malpractice caused by wealthy physicians) is being remedied. The immense volume of these commercials makes it clear that a commanding majority of daytime teevee viewers are lying in casts suspended from their ceilings, or soon will be after they call their lawyers.

Sure, everybody cheers when they hear that someone has scored a multimillion-dollar settlement for some slip, fall or motorcycle accident caused by a boss with deep pockets. But what happens after the headlines fade, the teevee lights go out and the channel gets changed?

That's when many settlement winners find that they've been saddled with a horrific structured settlement that pays an insulting pittance every month. What if one needs a lump-sum payment to cover, for example, bail or bulk purchase of high-grade hashish?

Fortunately, as those of us who watch daytime teevee understand instinctively, there exist companies that will convert your structured settlement or Lotto payments into one lump-sum payment for a fee. Consider the following fact: There are so many winners of structured settlements and Lotto jackpots that this (1) is an actual business, and (2) one that can afford to advertise on teevee. Frankly, this is frightening.

There is, unbelievably, a narrow minority of the populace that has neither been victimized by a wealthy employer into slipping or falling or bashing one's skull in after tumbling from a motorcycle, nor won Lotto. These people are the poor.

Happily, American business has not, like the government, forgotten its downtrodden. According to financier/ex-pitcher Jim Palmer, poor people who find themselves burdened by credit card debt can get their fiscal tuckuses in gear by refinancing their debt, i.e., taking out more debt in the form of a second mortgage.

Of course, not every single poor person owns a home. And if you're sitting around at home in the middle of the day, you probably aren't working, which makes it difficult to pay the rent, and this often leads to bad credit.

Apparently there are trillions of people -- all of them watching teevee during the middle of the day -- whose credit is so lousy they can't even get a cell phone. For the record, I don't personally know any of these loathsome people, nor do I wish to be introduced to any.

However, if you happen to be one of these "people," you have three frequently broadcast commercial alternatives:

• Join the U.S. Army, which will send you so far from home that you'll lose all your friends, so you won't have anyone to call anyway;

• Take out student loans to pay for trade school, where you'll learn to repair air-conditioning systems and you'll get to keep your own tools, which you can use to break into people's houses and steal their cell phones; or

• Call a psychic and have her conjure up better credit for you -- it's the least she can do for $40 a minute.

But nothing prepared me for a series of spots that recently began appearing in the middle of the day: Spots for cable teevee. "If you're not watching cable television," a blonde-sounding female mocks, "what are you watching?"

This is a question well worth pondering. But if you have four channels or 400, it doesn't matter much. You're a loser if you watch daytime teevee. <