After a very difficult week, I settled down to watch a little TV tonight. This was a mistake.

To those of you not from Alaska, let me explain about ARCS, which I believe stands for Alaska Rural Communication System. I suppose I should be grateful that it is here. I am trying very, very hard to be grateful.

In rural villages like this, there aren’t commercial broadcast outlets such as one finds in larger communities, and since we’re over a hundred miles from the next community of any size, we aren’t even able to glom onto somebody else’s broadcast. To this end ARCS was created. It provides a potpourri of broadcasts taken from other Areas, like Anchorage, Juneau and Mars.

Different networks programs are presented at different times to provide variety, balanced viewpoints and extreme frustration in the viewing public. A short study of the programming schedule will usually lead the casual observer to the conclusion that the job of Programming Director has been outsourced overseas, probably to a non-English speaking third world country where there are in fact no televisions, and mass communication is in the form of cave art.

As a case in point, Saturday morning is the purview, not of children’s programming as one might expect, but The McLaughlin Group, followed by some cooking shows.

“Debbie, since you and your little brother are home from school today and it’s snowed three feet since last night, why don’t you two sit down in front of the TV and learn how to be scream rude insults at people who disagree with you in any way. After that you can make flaming crepes in the kitchen for an afternoon snack.”

Friday night when one has just ended the regular working week, one can relax with an entire evening of community affairs programs. Programs with themes like recaps of the previous week in the Alaska Legislature and droning monologues about what-I-don’t-know-because-I-can’t-stay-focused-for-an-entire-minute.

Then there is the Public Broadcasting forecast at 5:30 p.m. So vital, it gives us forty minutes of low-budget forecasts twenty minutes before the professional commercial broadcast hosted by the cute Weather Sweetie. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the other fifteen minutes of the 5:30 weather broadcast is taken up by things like decades old NASA documentaries and spots on what an amateur astronomer would see if he lived in a place where the stars can be seen in the summer. (The easiest way to see stars here in the summer is to walk up to a large man and say something really uncalled for about his mother.)

Then there are the annual ANB events where one can spend hour after hour in the evenings watching someone else’s children performing native dances. (Note: I ‘m glad he kids get to be on TV- but prime time, c’mon!)
So that brings us to this week’s festivities- the Annual Public TV Beg and Whine Membership Drive. This is where we are asked, “if public TV didn’t do it, who would.” To which we answer, “elementary school classes with video cameras,” “public access cable channels,” “the Communist Party of Vermont,” “Lifetime for Women,” “Hallmark Theater”, and so forth.

I would suggest that terror suspects be coerced to give up information by making them watch public TV membership drives, but I’m sure we’d get into trouble with the international community if we did that.

Oh well, maybe I’ll just read a book.