Mrs. Teabody Invites the Underwoods to Take a Lesson from Hallmark

"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es."

- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

 Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826: "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es."   This translates to "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are."
Or as we have come to phrase it: 

You are what you eat

Five days after Thanksgiving 2017 many of us are still going around feeling like stuffed turkeys--bodies too big for our legs, woefully ill-prepared for flight or sudden movement, and quite willing to follow blindly those of our kind without considering consequences.

Garbage in, garbage out

"In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is where flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output or "garbage".The principle also applies more generally to all analysis and logic, in that arguments are unsound if their premises are flawed."

All this brings us to the weekend just past. I was living solo as my better half had swanned off to  Rochester for the weekend leaving me with our rude and unpredictable cat and the singular but content fish. My little shop's Christmas open house on Saturday occupied all my non-sleeping hours up until 1:30 on Saturday when I hung the "closed" sign on the door and my helpers and I went out to deliberately ingest some carbohydrate-laden food before making the trip home. 

A nice hot shower and pajamas by three o'clock. I swallowed an Advil and nestled into my comfy bed, tea and ice water on my nightstand to my right, the week's accumulation of post including no fewer than six magazines to my left. Cat at the foot of the bed. Remote in hand. I punched in 312 and prepared myself to be whisked away to Christmas Village or Mistletoe Inn or Holly Lodge. It doesn't matter in the world of Hallmark. I was immediately caught up in a world where an incredibly sweet and lovely young woman (who just incidentally painted like a dream) was living in the basement of her equally wonderful and lovely sister's house trying to find a market for her talents. 

Inside her friend's bakery she encountered a stunningly handsome young man while waiting in line for her muffin and a benign (yet meaningful!) chat ensued with our heroine cluing in the stranger about the best thing to order. SPOILER ALERT: muffin of the day. Sparks leapt through the television screen as I scanned the contents of the latest issue of SOUTHERN LIVING magazine. On the screen in front of me a budding romance was playing out. On my bed inside SOUTHERN LIVING I was visiting a house in Savannah all decked out for Christmas. I sipped  a few swallows of my fragrant tea, placed the cup on the nightstand, slid down against the pillows and was out like the proverbial lightbulb.

My sleep was pleasant and dreamless and I awoke to full darkness. The cat loudly proclaimed that it had to be left out. IMMEDIATELY. As did I. I puttered about our Christmasy house, turned on the tree lights and felt endorphins envelop my body. What a wonderful time of year!

Hallmark was still playing but the characters had changed and rather than start in the middle, I decided to ruin my perfect bubble of an evening by watching an episode (or six) of the Underwoods, AKA "House of Cards". 

If watching the Hallmark Channel is a dish of ice cream or a slice of wedding cake, then watching an episode of the Underwoods is a meal of battery acid.

"House of Cards" is a nihilistic version of "West Wing" - -a series enough like current political machinations in Washington D.C. that you sometimes wonder if script writers just watch the news and sit down and write an episode. Nothing good will come of anything. All humans are crap.The stars of the show are the thirty years married Underwoods who are not altogether unlike that other fun couple, the Macbeths. Like a character from the Hallmark Channel, Claire Underwood is stunningly gorgeous. Not a bubble of fat appears anywhere on her body even though she is at least 50. She runs. She smokes surreptitiously  She watches only the news on television. Her closest associate is her Secret Service agent. Her husband, Francis Underwood, is a devious amalgam of very career politician we have ever read or heard about. He is  a composite of every current and past scandal-plagued candidate wrapped into one despicable soulless package of vomit. I have never seen Claire Underwood clean out her car, read a magazine,  or sit at a table drinking wine with friends. Claire and her like-minded, power-grasping husband have NO FRIENDS. 

Just like I can count on things going well for that cast of characters at Hallmark, I can also predict that the Underwoods will continue their spiral into the depths of human depravity.

Operating on the principles of "we are what we eat" and/or "garbage in, garbage out", I dare say that life on the Hallmark Channel is better for us -- for our digestion, for our psyches. Good prevails; bad behavior is punished and with some gentle guidance even those with the absolute worst instincts can be persuaded to find their kinder selves after spending time in the presence of civil and well meaning people. Too pat?

In the early 90s, I started my day on the treadmill and I remember a September morning when I was watching my usual channel only to find my show of choice had been replaced by a show called "Jerry Springer." It took me about ten minutes to realize that this was a sensationalist entry into the TV world designed to appeal to our basest instincts. Nonetheless, along with millions of others I was drawn to this train wreck approach and its attempt to define the human condition. It was horrifying. Do we need reminders that sometimes folks act like animals? Fast forward to present day and I see a whole world of "entertainment" that seems to  hinge its success on featuring humans at the very worst. Too demoralizing?

I think we need to be as mindful about what we feed our heads as we are mindful of what we feed our bodies. 

Don't you agree?  Every day cannot be a Thanksgiving meal but an occasional indulgence is acceptable. We are not the Underwoods bent on taking over the world. (Thank God!) Truth of the matter is most folks aren't like the Underwoods at all. (Thank God!)

It is also true that we cannot check into Holly Lodge full time and live in a world where no one ever turns out the lights or wears an ill- fitting coat, where every story ends with a first pristine kiss just as the magical, un-cold snow begins to fall.  But, dang it, we can give it a serious try, and that is a world worth watching. And reaching for.