I was about to write the words, “Nothing shocks me on television anymore” when I realized that if that was true I wouldn’t be writing this. I get annoyed, mostly, by network television, but it’s been a long time since my breath was taken away. I’ve accepted without protest the most recent public spectacle of NBC’s regard for the reputations of Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, two richly rewarded good guys in a sea of counterfeit crap peddlers, who were forced to cannibalize each other publicly in the aftermath of a panicky decision following a corporate blunder. This doesn’t shock me. But I try to imagine Johnny Carson in a similar position.

This is what network television in the year 2010 does to its mega-mega-million dollar stars. But that’s the business of television. The programming is worse. And so much of network and local TV programming is insulting slop — the insipid reality shows, the mind-numbing repetitious local news programs that have less to say the more hours they broadcast the same weather, traffic, crime, weather, traffic, crime. But that battle was lost years ago. What’s getting worse about television is the whole package. And the effect it’s having on the way we think, or perhaps the way we once thought we thought.

For instance, imagine how many advertisements we see every day for expensive prescription medicines in which the bulk of the commercial consists of a warning of the possible side effects — up to and including “in rare instances” death — while showing happy people enjoying fulfilling lives, sometimes in separate bathtubs, with the same happy theme music playing in the background throughout. We’ve become slow-boiled lobsters who don’t even notice our bathtubs are side by side and outdoors. What’s that supposed to mean? Is that another side effect? Should we believe anything these people say? My six-year-old granddaughter Daphne summed up the message she understood after listening to a commercial for a famous brand name drug on TV. “What was that commercial about?” I asked Daphne from the sofa cushion beside her. Without looking up she answered, “Something that makes you sick.”

Not that we should worry about health when Billy Mays is still out there pitching products on TV commercials every day — months after the loud-talking and dark-bearded huckster died, he’s still shouting about miracle products that rub, rub, voila! Scratches gone, stains gone, life gone. How? Only the Sham Wow Guy knows. So what did I see on TV in the midst of such daily dreck that I never thought I’d see, let alone be shocked by? What gave me that Extra push?

It was the obscene juxtaposition of Haiti’s devastation and Heidi’s reconstruction, a full hour of intense coverage of the Port Au Prince corpses by a sunburned and genuinely overawed Brian Williams, a guy whose eyes you take to be your own, and to see that look in Brian Williams’ eyes made me want to look away. This relentless hour of death and despair was followed immediately by an Extra Extra report about the Olympic-record-breaking number of cosmetic surgeries visited upon Heidi Montag’s (trust me, she’s famous) boobs bust belly naval nip tuck, what the luck, ten surgical procedures in all and all at once.

Somehow I found it obscene in a great gulp of shame that this is what television is capable of. To follow the devastation of Haiti seamlessly with a report on excessive elective surgery options executed by the most beautiful woman on earth who can’t stand the sight of herself. Heidi, Heidi, Heidi hide. Heidi, Heidi, Heidi ho. In Haiti elective surgery means belated amputation of gangrenous limbs crushed in a cruel act of nature that mocks whatever gods that be. Life is unfair, yes, but does it have to be so relentlessly unfair to the dirt-poor desperate Haitis of the world while rewarding the already rich and famous blond Heidis?

And in the ten days since the disaster, not to mention the earthquake in Haiti, the obsessed Heidi chroniclers on television have tsk, tsked like pharisees about this unholy abuse of having so much “work done” so quickly, so publicly. Last Thursday night’s Extra ended a long Heidi segment with a creepy rhetorical question about Heidi’s poor choices. “What’s the message to young girls?” Extra asked with all the sincerity of a moralizing hobo about to hop a freight train.

Let’s see. What’s the message to young girls? Could it be, “Hey, you can get on television every night for weeks by being really beautiful and really stupid. And people will feel really sorry for you because you don’t get it and you never will.” If Haiti hadn’t happened this whole Heidi (not gonna say “hoopla”. Wouldn’t be prudent) boob job hoohah wouldn’t have seemed any worse than usual. Not shocking, certainly. But Haiti and Heidi happening together is the perfect hurricane of values. What interests us? What moves us? And when you get right down to it, which would you rather read about, humanitarian aid or humongous gazongas?

Not that there’s anything wrong with humanitarian aid. Heidi represents an unattainable greed for unattainable perfection. Haiti represents constant hunger for survival. What does Heidi have to teach Haiti about America? Nothing Haiti doesn’t know already. In fact, I’m guessing most Haitians would laugh when they heard about such a person. America has always represented a place where Heidis come true.

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