I just LOVE television!

In the Brian de Palma violent classic "Scarface", there's that memorable scene in the restaurant where an intoxicated Robert de Niro and wife Michelle Pfeiffer start throwing food and personal epithets at one another. The embarrassed patrons, although pretending to be unaware of the verbal discord, soon themselves become victims of Scarface's drunken wrath as he calls upon them to "look at the bad guy". "You need people like me" shouts Scarface. "I'm the bad guy. You need me so you can point and say, THERE IS THE BAD GUY."

Is it a trait of our culture that we love to see the bad guys? Perhaps because it makes us feel good? Why do we love to see someone else's misery and tragedy? Perhaps because it makes us feel blessed with good fortune? Turn on your television and you'll see what I mean. Why are our national news channels so preoccupied with the downfall of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and the plethora of bubble-heads who've taken the dictum "Any publicity is good publicity" to an absurd extreme? Is it because their tragedy gives us a warm feeling about how normal and happy we are? Or is it because we just love to be told a story?

When my children were little more than rug-rats, bed-time was always prefaced with the demand "Tell us a story, Daddy". And I'd make up a story, any old story would do, some clever and some really dumb. Because it was not WHAT I was telling them, but rather just the telling of the story itself. And it's the same with television news.

Even if no-one knows anything, we must be told a story. So the reporter will grab any poor sod in the vicinity, who to maximize his 15 seconds of fame, will tell us a story, some of it real, some of it just spit-balling. And we lap it up because we've been entertained. And the stories we enjoy most are the bad stories, the stories that frighten us, the stories about the bad guys. So we can sit back, smug, self-satisfied and say "there's the bad guy!" and feel so much better for our own good fortune.

The only problem with having so much news-time being spent on 'telling us a story', often over and over again, (remember how often you told the same old story to your kids every night?), is that we never get around to the real news - something I haven't seen a bizillion times already - like what's the latest update on Darfur, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the Chinese who're buying the USA, the Japanese electric car that performs better than a Porche, or Westinghouse that is alleged to have buried a patent to harness electric power from tidal movements and "dinner-jacket's" plans to nuke us all.

But who cares about that? It's not about us. It's not about now. So go away - Fox is telling me a story about a princess who lived in a trailer and who became so so rich that her evil godmother called in the boogey-man who was disguised as a shrink and together they planned and schemed to have the little princess locked up in a castle for little girls who are bewitched. And when the little princess was gone, the evil godmother took all her money and used it to make the princess's little sister even more famous. But meanwhile, back in the evil godmother's trailer, something terrible was about to be discovered .... (we'll be back after our scheduled commercial break.)Gotcha for the next episode?