The other night I turned on the TV and heard Glenn Beck say, "If Liberals have their way, soon a kid won't even be able to go into a toy store and buy a cap gun." (Add sneering dismissive hand motion here.) The tone in which he spoke out of my TV was so persuasive that for a split second I agreed with him! "Yes Glenn, soon our kids won't be able to know what it's like to decimate indigenous tribes, scare slaves or shoot their pastor-husbands in the back." What's next, the cancellation of all field trips to the slaughter house? And what did kids play with before cap guns, Glenn? A butter churn? A walnut? Toy guillotines?

For the record, I think cap guns SHOULD be banned, along with real guns, DDT, Chinese toothpaste, and private jets. Because as an evil liberal, I can picture a world where cowboys DON'T shoot Indians and gangsters don't shoot gangsters. And where 3rd graders would have the time to read In Cold Blood.

I don't really watch television. My attention span is too short. I have never seen an entire Super Bowl. I have never really seen an episode of M*A*S*H (it's too green) and just recently saw my first Laverne and Shirley (very funny). My TV diet is essentially a couple of South Parks and some Joan Rivers jewelry.

But lately I have noticed television is more immediate. Cockier and meaner, a crocodile in the shape of a seal. Ghoulish...

In the film Poltergeist, the evil doers are the "TV people," monsters who live in the television and create chaos in suburban homes--messing with children's minds and then putting all the chairs on the top of the table so the family can't eat.

This is happening today in millions of American homes. Families are separating. Dialogue is becoming obsolete, and the person with the most trivializing wave of the hand and longest finger is the winner. (Insert petulant and heavy sigh here.)

Recently, Sean Hannity said, "there are no Democrats in Heaven." How mean! Imagine if I wrote, "Hell is filled with rich newscasters from Fox?" I would never say it. Ever. (Add slight roll of the eyes here.)

The American landscape is taking cues from these TV people, and we are at a crucial moment. For the sake of our children--and our parents-let's choose peace over fear, conflict, and human suffering.

And it is all in the hands of the TV people. It was one of these ghouls that decided to put Marie Osmond's fall on Dancing with the Stars on an endless loop and insert extra SFX thuds to make it seem that Marie had been assassinated. For God's sake, is someone planning on putting her face on the penny and they haven't told us? The over all effect was disconcerting and exploitative. The TV people can ruin a dance show. The vibe is gone. Next season we can look forward to Jane Seymour putting the flourishes on a tango with a bit of spontaneous human combustion in slow motion with SFX sizzling.

The TV people have even ruined the Food Channel, morphing it from a gentle place for real instruction to a 24-hour NASCAR level food competition with its persuasive iron chef mentality. Why is crème fraiche in competition with ricotta cheese? Does pork really have to be a contender?

The TV ghouls are shooting out of the TV with laser like intensity, and all we can do is strap our kids to the bed, get mom and dad on high speed dial up, and pray for the squall to pass.

Nancy Grace is multiplying: she's added more shrill women, so it's like the earthquake in the Tiki Room.

Joe Francis calls Mother Kardashian from his jail cell to offer her daughter Kim a job as a model for Girls Gone Wild: Bikinis.

Then, there is my favorite ensemble of demons, VH1's I Love New York, which plays like macramé night at night at Alcatraz.

So, some of use has been left alone on the ice floe, as rest of the culture floats by...and like most lifeboats, they are filled with women and children-and me

I measure a culture on how they treat their children and elderly, and me. (Not necessarily in that order), which brings me to the real problem. Recently, more than a few of my liberal friends have secretly confessed, "All my parents do is watch the Fox New Channel." We all bow our heads in this disheartening fraternity and compare stories of visiting mom and dad, when we are forced to slink to our corners and suffer through the loud-mouth blatherings of Hannity & Colmes and friends. We are Fox News orphans. It's a hard knock life because Fox News really is the ground zero for the monstrous TV people.

Bill O'Reilly is a particular favorite in my dad's house. His time is hallowed. Phones are not answered and doors go unopened. Children go unnoticed. It's unseemly to spill the beans on one's parents, but there is just so much fear and superiority and hate one can stand.

And my hands are tied. I like my parents, and I can't tell them what to watch. After all, they never stopped me from watching Three's Company or Gomer Pyle. How can I ask my dad to turn off Greta van Susteren when she is reporting on "the decaying body of yet another hot dead co-ed"?

So I walk on a different ice floe in my father's house, inhaling second-hand horror, catching the words "alert," "emergency," "terror"-perpetually pulsating. The never-ending unsolved mystery of fear in my dad's cozy library is beginning to scare me. My blood pressure is rising.

The TV people are HERRRRE, berating and scaring and speaking down to us. And what concerns me most is that my father is starting to take on some qualities of the TV people: the finger in the face, the dismissive hand, the short tempered, world-weary O'Reilly sigh.

I want my dad back, Rupert Murdoch! Take back this Pat Buchanan dad and bring back my old Judd Hirsch dad! Because at this rate, some is going to have to take me away and replace me with Rosie O'Donnell, and boy, there's going to be an awful fight. (Insert dismissive Lollipop Guild impression of Donald Trump.)