Showing yet again how totally uncommitted about deadlines at least two of the three branches of our government can be, officials recently announced a delay in the much-anticipated switchover to one-hundred percent digital television signal transmission, which was scheduled for this coming February 17th but which has now been pushed back until at least June 12th of this year. The delay, championed by the new Obama administration, also had many fans among a certain clientele in the Congress (Democrats, who talk a good digital game but tend to come up short when the rubber finally meets the road).
I’m generally no fan of the new-breed Republicans in the Congress. They’re more of the same old soup (just heated up in a different bowl) as the last batch, and mainly interested in staying on schedule for the February roll-out almost solely to inconvenience the several million people out there who still haven’t been able to scrape up the government-subsidized sum it takes to get one of those analog-to-digital converter boxes - and who also happen to have voted heavily for Barack Obama in the last presidential election - but in this instance, they have a point, however misguided the path they used to arrive at it. Enough is enough, and it’s foolish to prolong things any longer.
How many years has this switchover been discussed, touted, advertised or otherwise publicized? I don’t know exactly, but it seems like forever. I mean, I can’t walk through the DVD player aisle over at my local discount department store without tripping over a stack of those boxes, or click on an Internet news site, turn on a TV show or listen to a radio program without some sort of blurb about the impending birth (finally!) of all-digital television signals. What are we waiting for, the discovery of cold fusion?
Let’s face it: In a nation of three-hundred million people, there are ALWAYS going to be seven or eight million of us who just can’t get it together enough to put a pair of shoes on the right foot, let alone work up the energy to save a few dollars and then head on over to the Sooper-Dooper Mart to pick up one of “them there converter box thingies.” We can wait until the Archangel Gabriel shows up to herald the dreaded End of Days, and I guarantee you there will be somebody, somewhere who still refuses to grasp that television is now more than just “television,” and not something used mainly to watch an endless series of Jerry Springer “my mom bedded my fiancée” vignettes, complete with a mother and daughter, both clad in pure, virginal white, fighting over Billy-Joe Jim Bob like a couple of crocodiles fighting over the last zebra to try to cross the Zambezi.
Besides, we do far more harm than good with this delay. We’ve spent untold millions preparing for the moment, and now we’ll be spending even more money we don’t have to give the Jerry Springer types even more time to screw up. Better it (the screw-up) happens now, in the dead of winter - where things are slower - than in the midst of a summer which promises to be full of hurricanes or other far more pressing issues demanding our attention, like that “72 Hours of The Rockford Files” marathon over on Channel 165.
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