Fast Talking Liars

Watching television is a dangerous thing: it makes people accept lies as truth without thinking. How else do you explain the outright lies on it these days? I am not talking about the Canadian election with a nice middle-of-the-road Stephen Harper, a defender of Canada Paul Martin and a business friendly Jack Layton, or the President south of the border. I am just talking about the simplest things, like some guy selling the knife that ends all knives. I am of course talking about the fast-talking chef-looking cheesy guy who opens the infomercial by throwing away a draw full of knives. The pitch is that the knife he is selling is so good that you would not want any other. That is very well and good if the knife is truly good. I can live with one chef’s knife alone; and some Chinese chefs use nothing but one huge cleaver. Since I have not used the knife in question here, I do not know if it is good or not. What puzzles me is that after demonstrating that this knife can do just about every household chore, he insists on giving us a dozen more. Why do we need anything else? Has he just dumped a couple dozens of knives into the trash? This is as good as admitting that he had lied when he said that one knife is all I need for the rest of my life. He expects us to not question him and call in to buy that one knife with a dozen throw-ins. A lot of people must have called in; otherwise they would not have the money to run all these infomercials for all these years. It is not fair to blame television; after all if we even use our brain minimally, we would not be fooled. But since our brains are so out of shape, maybe it would be a good idea to have a test, like a driving test, to approve the usage of television. But then, they would probably make sure that only quiet brains pass. Oh, well, never mind.