So I’ve been inexplicably receiving Entertainment Weekly for a few weeks now. I didn’t order the thing, and god knows I didn’t pay for a subscription. But for some reason they keep sending it to me. I don’t know why. The last thing I want to read about is Oprah’s Youtube channel and Jack Black’s new hair color (youtube.com/oprah and blond, respectively, in case you wanted to know). But as it turns out, one can discover quite a bit about our culture from perusing the pages of magazines like EW.

A recent cover article, for instance, was about the Writers Guild of America strike. In case you didn’t know, screenwriters all over the country are on strike for a higher percentage of profits and, pretty soon, there will be nothing but re-runs on TV (daily shows have already ceased production) and movies in 2009 will be severely hindered. Reading the article, one got the impression that this event was disastrous on an epic level, second only to Armageddon, maybe. We might not get new episodes of “The Office” every week! Tina Fey is angry! Jon Stewart won’t be on to give us the real news! (Well, come to think of it, that actually is bad.) I was ready to build a fallout shelter and stock it with DVDs of “Arrested Development” by the time I was done reading.

Well, ok, I thought. That’s their beat. Someone’s got to report about celebrities. It is called Entertainment Weekly, after all. Nothing to be worried about.

But then I saw the front page of the New York Times, and then the BBC. Guess what was the leading story? The WGA strike.

Don’t we know that there’s a war going on? That 3,100 people were killed in Bangladesh this month by a cyclone? (That’s more than were killed on Sept. 11.) That Pakistan is under martial law? That Burmese monks were brutally put down after protesting an oppressive dictatorship? The world, as usual, is in chaos, and news outlets, including the University Daily Kansan (Nov. 8 and Nov. 15) are freaking out about television. Entertainment. Blame it on the media, and blame it on ourselves.

For example: A few weeks ago, I wrote an article that took a couple of half-serious potshots at the sacred cow of local music. Previous articles on Darfur, Iraq, and Holcomb power plants received little-to-no response, but this one set off a wave of mail, angry comments and letters to the editor, the amount of which I had never seen before. It didn’t bother me­—some people didn’t understand the satire, apparently—but it only proved what I had hoped was not true. Our priorities are badly distorted.

Don’t get me wrong. I like TV as much as anyone else. I am an apathetic college student, and I share the blame. I want to be entertained. I’ll even entertain myself with songs about the pathetic irony of that attitude, like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” So if this article doesn’t apply to you, then I am very glad. But I expect this self-examination will find some empathy within the KU community.

I’m not going to make any cliché comparisons between the “good old days” of Ward and June Cleaver versus the mad United States of iPod in 2007. Maybe it was better back then, but odds are that it really wasn’t. Even so, it still doesn’t justify this contemporary “entertain me” mentality, nor does the fact that most all of us are guilty at one time or another. Has college become just an exercise in killing time? An adventure in missing the point? Football and beer seem to have a higher place on the hierarchy than community and altruism. We work hard for our classes and at our jobs, but hardly any of us actually take a moment to comprehend the rampant materialism that silently governs how we live and the media messages that reinforce it.

But I think that perhaps this TV pseudo-blackout will be good for us. Maybe we’ll be forced to, god forbid, watch the real news now. Read newspapers. Perhaps a book? Maybe that’s pushing it. Book on tape, anybody?

Petterson is a Prairie Village junior in English.