I have noticed that when taking my car for a tune-up, visiting the doctor or sitting in some hotel lobby, Fox News is often playing in the background. Picture that ubiquitous black TV that sits in the corner of every single waiting room in America. Or, at least, waiting rooms shared by Americans who might be best classified as working class or lower to middle class.
I assume that the rich don't use waiting rooms and if they do they have other diversions such as some kind of futuristic virtual reality machine.
The ubiquity of what I will call "waiting room Fox News" seems significant because it relates to what pundits and pollsters tell us about the importance of so-called "swing" voters: these mysterious Americans who at a moment's notice can change elections by suddenly voting Republican or Democrat. We are told that they need extra time to make a decision about a candidate's commitment or strength or sincerity or faith or some such characteristic which is important to leadership.
Of course, we know the real reason they cannot make up their minds is because they don't read newspapers or follow any policy discussions. In sum, they have no real idea which policies would advance their true economic and cultural interests.
Here is where Fox News comes in. We know that celebrities like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have legions of devoted followers who treat them as omniscient oracles for whom the political and moral dilemmas of our time are mere child's play. I suspect that these so-called legions are really an assortment of manly business types, conspiracy theorists and frat boys aping their manly business fathers.
Quite distinct from these rabid groupies and oddballs, most Fox News viewers are individuals, just like you and me, who are unwittingly exposed to the cable channel as back-ground noise. (I have a sub-theory about why manly business types feel the need to impose this noise on the rest of us, but it requires a lengthy digression into Freudian sexual repression).
TV as noise is generally harmless except for the dull malaise it often induces. But Fox News as noise has much larger ramifications. The well-known brilliance of Fox News is that it presents GOP doctrine as fact and does it in quick and looping sound bites. This is tantamount to hypnosis for the unsuspecting and ignorant listener -- in other words, the swing voter.
And here is the GOP's sure bet come election season. They will have hypnotized millions of swing voters who sit trapped in the mind-numbing purgatory of waiting rooms around the country. Of course, the true tragedy unfolds when these poor souls stumble out into the world and carelessly vote in favor of a conservative policy which will inevitably harm and further disadvantage them in ways they cannot ever imagine.
You might correctly surmise that what I claim is slapdash. But I appeal to your intuition. You can feel that what I say is as close to truth as any of those wonderfully mesmerizing mantras chanted on Fox News again and again and again and ... wait a second, maybe free health care for poor children really is un-American!
No, the big question of our time is what would happen if individuals in waiting rooms across the country collectively stood up and turned off Fox News. My prediction is that, on this impossible day, millions of swing voters will awaken from their conservative stupor and finally vote as God intended them to vote -- at random.