On Madonna's No TV Policy

by John Ettorre

You can hear some amazing things in America simply by driving along and listening to the radio.

NPR, my channel of choice, likes to call them driveway moments – as in, the story’s so good that you wait in the car to hear the ending. I’ve heard more than my share of these gems.

In the last few months, I’ve heard a trio that knocked me for a loop, each focusing on some aspect of family life. One involved Seattle Mariners baseball star and Japanese native Ichiro Suzuki and his father. His dad, a Buddhist, gave young Ichiro a top-of-the-line baseball glove as a kid, hoping to teach him to revere it as a valued tool of his craft. And he did. The boy grew up treating the glove almost as if it were a person, lovingly oiling it and restringing it as needed. Those careful habits helped him get to the American big leagues, where things were decidedly different, and the tools of one’s trade held in less reverence. Now he would watch in horror, as a brutish teammate would dishonor his glove, casually tossing it into the dirt, or worse yet, sitting on it.

More recently, I enjoyed hearing about a young woman who was valedictorian of her high school class in Syracuse, New York. In working on her commencement speech, she inserted a bit of humor in her ending, a small joke pointed at herself. "If you’re still listening…" she planned to say, knowing that it would be a hot day and that her classmates would be growing restless. Her mother was horrified, begging her to take it out. When it came time to deliver her speech, she indeed got catcalls from the crowd to "wrap it up." Her mom was reduced to tears, thinking the light heckling had ruined her daughter’s special moment. "I didn’t see it that way at all," the girl said. And that self-deprecating ending? It prompted appreciative laughter and applause from the audience. Sometimes kids really do know better.

Perhaps the most surprising recent radio story involved Madonna, the Material Girl, a pop music vixen who has since transformed herself into a parental role model of impeccable rectitude. It seems Madonna, that infamous quick-buck author of a particularly raunchy coffee table book, is a different sort of gal when she goes domestic. At home, she’s a mom, and apparently a thoughtful, wholesome one at that.

The iconic singer, who once enjoyed romping around the stage in an over-the-top dominatrix outfit, doesn’t permit her kids to watch TV. Now hear me right, people: I didn’t say she limits tube watching. No, the television is completely off limits.

Which got me to thinking: If Madonna, with all her pop culture savvy, thinks a simple living room appliance will do her children harm, who are we lesser mortals to disagree? The answer, of course, is that most of us don’t. But sticking to our guns is another thing. We go through crackdown cycles in our house. My wife used to enforce a complete TV ban lasting most of the summer, which is quite a trick, but she’s softened as our teenagers grew. We even tried our best to change the family’s bad habit of referring to that place as the TV room, but it never took.

But the biggest source of problems? Well, in our house, it’s me. After a long day of flying my fingers across the keyboard with masterful élan, I feel I’ve earned the right to come home in the evening to a change of pace. That sometimes means sitting on my arse, munching on a treat and watching cable-news combatants square off over the issues of the day.

It’s harmless, of course. Or is it?

The truth isn’t so obvious. While we all try to inject tube moderation in our households, probably too few families ever reach that elusive balance, and parental role models are the key. Too much couch-potatoing has slowly sucked the life out of many American families. It’s even helped rob us of our urge for civic engagement, some experts maintain. As the influential Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argued in his book Bowling Alone, excessive TV-viewing has kept us from engaging in the kinds of small but vital civic endeavors, like the homely art of the bowling league that used to more closely knit our communities together.

So the next time you’re pulling into the driveway after a long day of work, or a day spent ferrying kids crosstown, fire up your imagination and try to picture a world in which we all followed Madonna’s lead. Try to imagine a place where TV is but an occasional diversion, rather than the central family instrument. It might seem like science fiction. But it’s worth the effort, and a whole lot more interesting than watching R-rated reruns of the Material Girl vamping it up.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has also worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. His online weblog, Working With Words, can be found at www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.