The Good Guys
by Brian Dear
Originally posted in the WELL's media conference, Monday 17 August 1998. after
then-President Clinton gave the (in-)famous speech to the nation on television.
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My wife and I don't watch television, and we didn't feel
like going to my office at work to fire up the RealVideo
player only to learn that 5,000 other people are using all
the available RealServer ports thank you, so we did
something even better, we drove to the local Good Guys and
went into the TV department to watch the speech. Of course,
when you walk into a Good Guys, at 6:56pm Pacific Time on a
Monday evening, there aren't too many customers in the
sprawling store, so all the sweaty, red-eyed sales reps, in
the wrinkled salesclothes, are all gathered together
keeping themselves awake, then eyeing us over, trying to
figure out of these two new marks, er, customers, are worth
selling to or not. Me in my shorts and sandals, doing my
best Big Lebowsky impression. I guess the sales sharks
figured we weren't bigtime spenders cuz they left us alone,
and let us walk clear across the store to the TV section,
with ten thousand televisions lining the aisles and walls
and even hanging from the ceiling, and all, every one of
them, showing the same stupid baseball game. So the
question is, how do you explain to a sales shark that you
don't watch television but there's no way in hell we're
gonna miss Clinton speaking tonight and could we just take
this remote control here, pull it off of its velcro
fastener and change channels on this one TV out of ten
thousand so that we could watch Clinton? Well, the moment
one pulls a remote control off of its velcro fastener is
the moment the sharks disperse and start smelling blood,
and in a split second one was upon us, "May I help you?"
and I provide the standard reply, the emptor's standard
reply, and the verbal equivalent of hitting a shark in the
head right between the eyes to stun him and make him go
away in a "these aren't the droids I'm looking for" brief
stupor: "Oh we're just browsing". But then I look at my
watch and it's one minute before seven and there's no way
I'm gonna be able to figure out in one minute how to throw
the master switch for the store such that all ten thousand
televisions stop showing the stupid baseball game and start
showing the stupid president, so before the sales shark has
swim too far away I call to him and ask, um, is there a way
to look at any other channels besides this baseball game?
To which he replies, in a word, no. The store only has one
cable channel. In fact it's a DSS sattelite demo channel
or something. So we figure heh, we came all the way out to
this store to watch the President of the United States, and
we're not gonna get to see him, so we figure oh well, we
blew it, we might as well browse the store. So we go over
to another section of the store, which has a few telvisions
on display in a sort of loser's aisle (perhaps these were
refurbished/returned models), [a loser's aisle being the
equivalent of, say, the Macintosh section of the typical
CompUSA], and lo and behold, there's Larry King, looking,
well, like Larry King, suspenders and obnoxious tie and
all, talking to various talking heads who all look rather
clueless and uncomfortable, and the CNN LIVE logo down at
the bottom, indicating "7:01pm" and Larry says "two more
minutes" and a few more talking heads say their inanities
and at about this moment one of the sales sharks comes over
to a nearby collection of video games in an aisle behind us
and starts playing some game with the volume turned up
rather loud, and my wife has to reach for the TV volume
control in front of us and turn up the volume so we can
hear the TV, and the onscreen display informs us that the
volume is now set to "half" of its full loudness, and then
suddenly the screen goes black and then there's the face of
someone who looks sort of like President Clinton, but his
face seems shallower, tighter, perhaps full of makeup. His
eyes are all Clint Eastwood slits. Is he faking holding
back crying? And then he speaks, he doesn't say "My fellow
Americans, I come before you tonight...", which is what I
fully expected him to say, he just says "Good evening" and
dives right into things, and then it occurs to me that he
couldn't say "My fellow Americans, I come before you
tonight" as that would make too many people over the age of
30 think of Richard Milhous Nixon and that wouldn't serve
his purposes very well at this moment. And at this moment,
as he begins his and drops the bomb ("Indeed, I did have a
relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate")
making me and my wife silently gasp for a moment in a We're
Witnessing History kind of realization, but we couldn't
hear what he said after that because the video game behind
us suddenly got louder, and I turned to look at what the
commotion was, and there are several sales sharks standing
around one of these videogame kiosks, and one of them is
looking right at me, and then he says "Turn it up" to one
of the fellow sharks, as he's looking right at me, as if to
say to me, "We don't like people coming in the store just
to watch TV, if you're not going to buy something we're
gonna make it really unpleasant for you to stay here" and
now the volume is BOOMING, in deep HOOM HOOM HOOMs that
only subwoofers can produce -- the booms of a subwoofer
being deeper than BOOMS, they're more like HOOMS -- and so
we find ourselves having to turn up the volume on poor
President Clinton even louder, in order to hear him ("I
misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret
that."). And the sales sharks respond in kind, upping
their own volume, so that now we're trying to listen to
Clinton ("And now the investigation itself is under
investigation") amidst the HOOM HOOM HOOM and chucka chucka
boom boom tissle tissle bam boom of the video game. So we
crank the volume up to near full (and this is a Yamaha home
entertainment system with separate speaker towers I'm
talking about), and we're getting a bit annoyed that we
have to turn the damn volume up so high to hear the
President ("Now it is time -- in fact, it is past time --
to move on") over the HOOMs of Nintendo. Then, suddenly,
the speech was over, and Larry King appeared again, him
too, I believe, a bit surprised at the brevity of the
speech, a genuine "Ok, I *did* it, okay? Can I go now?"
speech if there ever was one, and Larry turns to Jim
Carville, who is beginning to resemble, to our
non-television eyes, the Alien in the movie Alien, and asks
for his comments. The HOOMs are so loud that we decide not
to stick around to hear the pundits tell us what we should
think, so we left.
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