Cable charade

Life has become what I do between talking to cable TV providers.

Before the switch from analog to digital in February of 2009, my monthly television-watching habit was the thinnest slice of a pie chart. After February 2009, you could erase the pie chart. I disappeared altogether from the world of signal transmission. This is another way of tipping you off that I lack even the basic vocabulary for ordering the cable service I now need since my father moved in and wants his FOX and sports back. And as we all know, vocabulary is half of mastery.

I read an ad for a “Prime” package of offerings and assumed it to be the company’s top-shelf combo for bundling all my coaxial needs. Prime, after all, is defined in reputable sources as “chief, key, primary, foremost, paramount, and major.” I was sure I would not need “Prime” because my father (as I noted) requires only the news and a smattering of sports.

Imagine my surprise upon learning there was a fiber-optic composite creature a notch more formidable than “Prime”: “Preferred.” “Preferred” has more channels (we had 12 in the ’50s, channels 2 to 13) and other broadband incidentals, thus being “preferred” among discriminating shoppers. This only stands to reason, now that I think of it, since preferred, according to the aforementioned lexical authorities, means “better than another, or others.”

There are no tricks up God’s sleeve, no fine print, no bait-and-switch, no gotcha clause, no changing terms of agreement in midstream.

But now that I knew “Preferred” was a step up from “Prime,” the unexpected byproduct of this gnosis was that the word prime lost its luster. There was something sad about this. Imagine the disillusionment of the “Prime” club out there in TV land who esteem themselves the nonpareil darlings of the home office and think inevitable their gilded invitations to the next Caribbean cruise board meeting to be feted in the fashion in which they deserve. “Prime” may be something rare in USDA’s world of meat cuts, but in the world of program broadcasting it is chopped liver.

My education was not yet complete. “Preferred,” make room for “Extreme.” Like the prophet Samuel inspecting a lineup of kingly candidates among old Jesse’s fine sons and finding each more impressive than the last (1 Samuel 16), I had my head turned presently by a package that means “reaching a high or the highest degree, very great, utmost, greatest possible, maximum, supreme, exceptional, extraordinary.” There is no need to tell you that “Preferred” became instantly Not Preferred, and “Prime” was twice devalued.

And with it all, a vague diminution of the English language.

If you think we have reached the extremities of RF rapture with “Extreme,” you must be, like me, a monastic type dragged kicking and screaming into modernity, for I see you know nothing of “Ultimate” HD. The dictionary definition of ultimate: “the best achievable or imaginable of its kind, the last word, epitome, pinnacle, acme, zenith.”

What could the emporiums of these prime, preferred, extreme, and ultimate pleasures be but gleaming castles of enterprise on a hill? Like Apple stores. Well, it was silly of me to expect an army of blue-shirted true believers descending on me with smiles and complimentary bottled water, but neither did I expect ghetto cash-checking look-alike storefronts, with long queues of disgruntled customers serviced by two jaded troubleshooters. So much for man-made superlatives, the Greek masques behind which we hide our dissimulations.

I have to remind myself, when reading Scripture, that God is not like that. His yes is yes; His no is no; His “far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20) cannot be out-imagined and does not disappoint. His price is the same for all and does not vary for the pushy and the savvy. There are no tricks up His sleeve, no fine print, no bait-and-switch, no gotcha clause, no changing terms of agreement in midstream. God alone is not hyperbolized.

“Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. … ‘Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan, I will now arise,’ says the Lord. ‘I will place him in the safety for which he longs.’ The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:2, 5-6).

Email aseupeterson@wng.org