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Christopher Ketcham

TV Toxicosis: What the Stewart / Colbert News Clowns Are Really Up To

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Some quick lab notes will suffice as a measure of the severity of the problem. Depression, angst, worry and sorrow are ameliorated for the duration of use, but only briefly, as the mild stimulant effect, the lightening of mood, the gentle euphoria, the amnesiac calm coupled with brain analgesis, wears off. Following as short an exposure as two hours – defined here as binge viewing – the subject is reduced to a pile of mental rubble. Mild to moderate depression, along with inability to concentrate or get anything substantive accomplished, follows hard upon the binge, a post-trauma often lasting several days.

Note the pervasive nature of the temptation to use. Upon seeing a television in most any public space, subject’s attention is drawn away from conversation, the drug exerting what can only be characterized as gravitational force. Eyes dart away from human interlocutors. In situations where the drug can be used recreationally in a safe enclosure, however – where the subject can relax in a chair or on a soft couch – the disorder can be documented fully. After multiple (2+) hours of use, subject’s mien and posture are negatively affected. There is a visible sagging of the jaw, the mouth hangs slightly limp. Skin tone and texture take on a sallow, damaged look. Blood drains from the face, and the flesh on the cheeks appears to loosen. Altogether, the face assumes a kind of death mask. Hair takes on a limp appearance, while the nostrils seem to get bigger. Shoulders slump, limbs are static, eyes retreat into the head and grow ringed. Mental acuity and general cognition are almost immediately, and drastically, reduced; brainwaves approach torpid, ie near comatose, activity. Subject sometimes cannot speak in answer to the simplest queries. The subject might be described at this point as approaching paralysis, though it was found on several occasions that the paralytic condition was broken almost immediately by any intimation of the curtailing of use; on at least one occasion, this researcher was attacked in a physical display of remarkable ferocity after he interrupted the experiment for dinner.

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