PAH! #174 December 1, 2004

Coincidence? I think not?

First of all, why are they called "TV" dinners?

They're just little blocks of food. Frozen peas, mashed potatoes, beef and gravy. That's how TV dinners began back in the 50s. Basically it's the same menu that housewives in aprons served to their families minus four hours in the hot kitchen in an apron, nipping at cooking sherry.

They're called "TV" dinners because they fit neatly on a tray in front of your chair, the chair in the room with the TV.

Until they came out with these same foods in frozen blocks apportioned into sections of a small rectangle (a familiar site to World War II GIs) that fit perfectly on a tray propped up in front of a chair facing the television, you couldn't very well serve a big bowl of mashed potatoes, roast beef, and a trough of succotash in the room where you could watch the TV while you ate.

But the frozen dinner introduced a new idea: Take the meal away from the table and you also take away the table. Take away the table and no one sits facing each other.

No talking. And no more dishes (where, elbow to elbow with a sibling or parent or grandparent, one was able to experience the accomplishment of taking something dirty, making it clean, and either giving or receiving advice.)

Since then, to make a gargantuan jump in our cultural history, we no longer talk and we've learned to throw everything away. Cameras, TVs, computers. There remain a few old-timer Mr. Fix-Its who still unscrew the back of consoles in their garage workshops filled with jars full of nuts and bolts and a well-used soldering iron, just as you'll find a few greenies who suffer through diaper washings as a gesture of kindness to Mother Earth. (Mother Nature, had she her druthers, also wishes more of us would ride the bus.)

But mostly, we riff off the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We just never fix it. We pitch it even before it's broke because it's replacement just went on sale.

Think about the word "fix." We fix meals. Fix broken toasters. The whole point about being "in a fix" is to "fix to get out of it."

The entire idea of "fixing" things is nearly extinct. I brought my computer to the store for a diagnostic. The computer guys said, "It's so corrupted by spyware. It's no longer under warranty. Just throw it away."

In a throwaway culture, something becomes disposable when the warranty lapses.

Does that apply to kids? Maybe a child's warranty is up when he or she turns eighteen. "Sorry, kid, we're no longer obliged to fix you -- you're on your own."

And marriages? They should come with warranties. It would help make "till death do us part" less ominous in a disposable world. At it's worst, "death do us part" sounds like a life sentence. I know a woman who counsels prisoners. She says when they get life-without-parole, they freak out. Understandably. She has to teach them how to cope with life, not as the long, no-exit sentence ahead, but in parcels of 24 hours. Think no further than getting through today is her advice. (Life imprisonment, dieting, quitting smoking, marriage . . . all benefit from the same advice.)

Not only is it good advice for the marrried, but I think it should be legally made into marital policy. In a throwaway culture, marriage's "till death do us part" vows seem anachronistic. Let's get real. Built into marriage the "rest stops" or "exit ramps" that give us all a chance to stop, reflect, and renew. Formalize these junctures (like job reviews). Make marriage a series of 1, 3 or 5 year commitments. This framing of larger commitment into briefer periods is in better alignment with the way our culture looks at time. Is there anything else in this life to which we must forever commit? A job, a house, a haircut? No. So why a spouse?

The change of seasons is rejuvenating. The renewal of wedding vows, done far too infrequently, have in my experience seemed to truly freshen marriages. If we make it easier to renew those vows more frequently, the vows will be more frequently countenanced. The garden of commitment will be reseeded.

And society can then be proud of its new strategy to combat the uncommunicative, throwaway culture that was set into place by the frozen dinner of the 1950s.