Loud Commercials on TV; Does Regulation Still Work?

Caption: Thomas Frank, my favorite political writer, photographed at the University of Iowa when he spoke there. Frank has written many books, all of them smart, well researched, amusing, and profoundly insightful: "One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy," "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, an d Beggared the Nation," "Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right," and "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?"

Very loud commercials have come crashing into my consciousness again. Is it just me, or have commercials suddenly become much louder than programming over the last part of this summer? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) supposedly wants to know about loud commercials, but they want us, the consumers, to do the detective work. They want dates, times, information about what the commercial is advertising, what program it’s attached to, what channel it's on, whether you’re watching pay TV, cable TV, or broadcast TV. They have an address and a phone number you can send that information to. Hopefully, the address isn't a post office box in the Cayman Islands and the phone number isn't a phone booth in Nogales, Arizona.

I get very annoyed when some mattress commercial blows me out of my sofa. I thought only pickup truck and car commercials were that noisy. Now mattress commercials are equally raucous? Why? When I see my bed I think about sleeping, not roaring up a steep mountain road over boulders or speeding along a west coast highway with the wind blowing through my hair.

I’m still learning how to knit lace without making a mistake in every inch of knitting. I'm sure my knitting teacher would like that too, although she's very kind and patient as she fixes my mistakes. I don’t need loud commercials. It’s enough for me to get up for a minute and leave the room for me to forget whether I’m knitting (with slip slip knits, double decreases, knit two together, yarn over) or just purling a row while purling some seven-stitch sequence into one stitch called a “nupp” or a “bubble.” I like my nupps to look nice and round, not like the cat got ahold of it. I don’t need loud commercials! Does anyone?

Actually, I shouldn’t watch TV at all when I’m knitting lace. I couldn't at first and I'm not sure I can now.

If I actually notify the FCC about when I hear loud commercials in the hopes that they’ll care, I’ll have to give up knitting altogether and keep a loud-commercial journal instead.

In "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation," author Tom Frank's working theory with a vast amount of incredibly depressing evidence is that cynical conservatives wrecked government to prove that it doesn't work. We've seen that in the case of the Veterans Administration. Republicans have been obstructionists in Congress to make sure that gridlock is the norm and Congress doesn't work. Let's see if the FCC still works. I'm starting my journal. If my knitting suffers, so be it. It was already suffering.