Feed Your Head

By Mike Marino

It was an age of paranoia, not the colorful and harmonious age of Aquarius sung and hailed by the Fifth Dimension, quoth the raving nevermore. Why do so many sit in front of television sets with tin foil hats on you ask, You did ask, didn't you? They do wear it don't they/ You with the roll of Reynolds wrap at the ready and reading this readily.

Armies of defoliated tinfoiliated Citizens of the Tin Foil Nation, shoulders heavy with the burden of unexplained theories of conspiracy. Too much stimuli...atomic amounts...faster...faster...dial phones, dial tones, cell phones, ring tones...awash we are in an ocean of information....a small fish...a big fish...a one ton newt-on a neutron minnow in a wasteland so technologically vast, so powerful with information, it could level the Great Wall of China faster than an earthquake in Haiti.

You know, the whole tinfoil television connection is a direct result of the Atomic Age. Think about it...the Googie Fifties...the advent of the TV tray to place the TV dinner on to sit in front of the TV set to watch Uncle and Auntie Miltie. The TV dinner had a peel back tinfoil cover that when ceremoniously pulled back revealed bad meatloaf.. Next...(there was not cable..only antenna telly)...when you wanted to boost a signal you placed a strip of tin foil on the connectors to the antenna to summon the signal gods from network heaven to dismiss the ghosts of double vision that formed on the screen....we used the foil, unfolded, to wrap and cover the television dinner leftovers in the duck and cover age of space too...face it..television and tin foil go hand in hand...today, schizoid and psychotic alike, try to block perceived (to them a reality world gone awry) government rays from emanating from the TV and ensconcing themselves, barnacles on the brains...they fashion and don tin foil hats as a protective barrier against Manchurian Candidation, a tin foiled-again government...of the tinfoil people, for the tinfoil people and by the tinfoil people ..now we have legions of Reynolds wrapped Tin Heads, all bad limited edition imitations of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz...the first of the Metal Heads!

The true power of the medium flexed its muscle, when Kennedy democratically debated, defaced and debased a tired 5 o'clock shadowed Ricky Ricardo Nixon on television. Nixon was stuck in the past of radio...won the debate on that medium by the way,...but Kennedy coiffed and confident won the tube race, (radio with pictures, this television)...next the power morphed before our very eyes, as as we watched the Vietnam war unfold body bags one by one in our living rooms, along with napalm and B-52's (not the group)....Korea was not televised...the big one was not televised...but we invited Vietnam into our living rooms as an unwitting host invites a vampire into it's home....if we didn't like what we saw we just changed the channel, poof...reality gone in a puff of smoke...never before was the mute button used to silence a war....it was also the first war, with real dead people, that took two minute breaks for commercials...Vietnam...brought to you by General Motors...makers of fine cars and tanks.....GE...better living through chemistry...

Also in the big stimuli parade came the silver screen sci-fi B-screamers. Cheap tin foil suited creatures from outer space. Tin and tinfoil miniature saucers dangling on strings of cheese before assaulting a miniature earth. Tin and tin foil....the foil is not a fable. Even the tv show...Rin Tin Tin...two tins, not just one, all an effort to block out stimuli and to starve the head from Speedy Alka-seltzer and his mad, Madison Avenue kinfolk. Scrubbing bubbles, my ass. It was enough stimuli to make the mind run amok amongst the snap, crackle and pop of the medium and its mixed messages. Bravo Brillo! It was too much....we found a need to starve ourselves in our back yard Eisenhower bomb shelters, right next to the tinfoil covered grills of our backyard barbeque....isolated from isotopes and ready for radioactive activity..bring it on..."we've got your tin foil right here!" It was all tin and aluminum..silver and shiny...The Invasion of the Aluminati!! The Tin Lateral Commission.

Three stations, maybe four if you were lucky were on the air. UHF was in the future, VHF ruled the airwaves...(cable hadn't reared it's Borg-like head to feed us intravenously...bundled no less...in complete control of our daily lives..phone-cable-internet...one down, all down)..much as AM ruled the radio roost until FM...Amplitude modulation made room for frequency modulation with a sexy undulation. Then...along came Pong...King Kong Pong...the future was beckoning and little did we realize the avalanche of stimuli that would come crashing down the mountain and close off all routes of escape. A sinister little game to be played on your telly screen with a few screws and wires..we were on the cusp...and didn't know it...this little game that walked with an electron limp, the recon unit of the information age...spies in disguise really....Chinese-like, like a slant eyed ping-pong ball, not round, but vertically rectangular like a piece of Pez candy floating without strings nor wings...we had pong without the ping impinging into our daily red, white and blue lives...our beehives....our tinfoil lives....it was all Greek to us...or Chinee or maybe it was English but we just didn't understand it or the ramifications.

Dick Tracy and his gizmo's and gadgets were fantasy...imagine talking into a watch that was a phone and a video at the same time...impossible...not plausible...the stuff of fantasy...Star Trek...beaming and streaming through space the final frontier..preposterous!!

Later it was Alex Trebeck tossing out trick questions, coded messages, over our heads, and into the shortwave earphones of East Berlin agents; reruns of a James Dickey South floating flotilla's of Ned Beatty’s running the rapids in rivers of no return, banjo's dueling. Then bang pow zoom...caped crusaders chasing after boy wonders and men from u.n.c.l.e.s. avenging them and getting smart with agent 99 who had just finished bonding with james showing pussy galore. Hillbillies on the move to be with Beverly in the hills, and gullible Gilligan was guiless and directionless, adrift and drift less at the same time, timeless and out of time with the times and out of step and off the beaten path on a three hour tour.

Superman had committed suicide. The fucking Man of Steel, not faster than a speeding bullet to the brain. Kennedy proved that too...Two Kennedy's actually on the table, and King in the wings of Memphis. Conspiracy...conspiracy...a canned good packaged since man invented paranoia...Judge Crater...Amelia Earhart....who killed Kennedy and King and Oswald and Giancana and Rosselli and just where the hell is Hoffa anyway?

The Sixties brought a war right smack dab into our living rooms....we had vicious attack dogs by German Shepards who were eating southern Negroes who in turn were only trying to effect and initiate a counter balance to the unbalanced bus depot lunch counter. These dogs were so vicious PETA itself would call for the wholesale killing of them on a level never imagined before or since along with the holders and handlers who grinned with shit kickin' grits eatin' drawl and backwoods smile and simplicity of someone whose been dropped on their heads one two many times or swam in the swamps or bobbed for apples in the family outhouse on Grandaddys birthday while he dithered himself to Buck Owens music in old black and white on the Grand Old Opry...

Firehoses flooded our patio from these images, imagine...people trying for equality in late 20th century America...America for Christ sakes...land of the free, all men are created equal..except for them and you and me. Protesters bashed daily by Daley in Chicago...protesters ...imagine that in the land of the free, America again, where freedom of speech and dissent are cornerstones of its democracy...no this is not Red Square or Tiananmen...but Chicago. The Pepsi Generation was replacing all things Coke...and cola moved over for the un-cola and everything was upside down...damn that Pong...I forgot about that little bastard of genuine genetic engineering genius..a Mengele experiment...like shoving a VW up the ass of a 1939 Jewish banker and turning him into a flesh and blood garage for stolen and now stored Gestapo booty in a booty.

Player pianos rippin' out with 78 rpm honky tonk wimmen to Victorious Victoria's Victrola and through the alley and 8-tracking it through the woods to the planet MP3 where a full scale invasion of the body snatching I-Pods was carefully underway. The telegraph cables were twisted into knots, poles used for pirate planks and fiber was good for optics as well as your digestive tract. So many channels to choose from it's as grueling as watching one episode of Real Housewives of Toledo. Cougars my ass.

Face lifted hags who have spent too much time in the sun and look like cheap hookers on the streets of Gary, Indiana...that is as bad as it gets...no lower than Gary my friends. Been there? Don't judge unless you have. We went from the telegraphers key...dit..dit..dit...dat...dis n' dat....rattatat-tat...Thompson machine gun fast across the wired landscape of the old odd west to images of Chistopher Walken on SNL offering more Campagn-ya.

Today..it's the Food Channel, Look-A-Like on the TV Guide Channel..like we really tune in the TV Guide Channel for programming...we just want to know what’s on NatGeo, please, thats it...Ok, "Punk'd" isnt bad...Bravo with it's feminine overtones, reality this and reality that none of which are reality anyway, CNN boring it's way around the world stuck on one news subject for 24-hours a day for a 6 months at a time...newspapers have burst into the flame of history and nostalgia and turn into the ashes of the past as Yahoo and Google bring us our news with the speed of light...so fast, it makes you twitter with delight. The Weather Channel that is predictably wrong when it comes to predicting.

Cable, cell phones, i-pods, wireless computers, wired computers, radio, the internet, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, blah, blah, blog...today we are bundled...and coddled by technology....it's an overdose of information. It's all about self today..thank god in the Sixties these channels of information weren't available. We would never have gotten out of the house or on the road. Fuck GPS...give me a ratty old randy Rand McNally with creases and food greases from diners and dives. The lava lamp was about as high tech as we got...we just got high, not high tech...we got stoned in Technicolor...not technical...freaks...not geeks ...better living through chemistry...outer space? The light show at the Fillmore was our space shuttle to our starship on Jefferson Airlines riding on the back of a white rabbit....the music? Amplified!, not computerized wimp pop Beyonce crap either. Our imaginations ran rampant....we read Ramparts...we were Fugged, not fucked...and Tinfoil? Yes...it was the Mother of Invention.

Today...the Borg revel in a lack of revelation...the tinfoil is flying off the shelves like Burrito Brothers, brother, where art thou? The next time you see some hapless individual wearing tinfoil protection as a protective suit of armor...walk up to them....greet them kindly...and say simply this..."Just unplug the damn thing...cut the power of the technological age...the Twin Towers was nothing...pull the plug and see what happens...."