The Fourth Estate

Eve's mother liked the president on Channel 6, a clean-cut man with a nice suit that didn't raise his voice and was often photographed volunteering for the less fortunate. But her father preferred the president on Channel 13, whose steely gaze and gruff demeanor projected deep, untapped reserves of brute strength through the screen. His face was a rugged bronze and his upper lip bore a coarse salt and pepper mustache. He spoke of hard choices that must be made in tough times and refused to capitulate on principles, period. That president seemed a little silly to Eve. Not as silly as the morbidly obese woman in a muumuu and a purple beehive wig on channel 92 that her older brother, Andy, had dabbled with to upset Eve's father after his first year of college, but still not someone she could take seriously as a leader. His heart was too cold and his trigger finger too itchy.

But it didn't really matter what Eve thought. Not for another week anyhow. Until then, when she turned 18 and got her own remote, she'd just have to grin and bear whichever president her parents wished to inflict on her to better influence her vote.

"The world is a dangerous place," her father said. "Have you even seen the Channel 13 news lately?"

"I just want to make sure your generation has the same opportunities ours had," her mother told her. "It's not easy with so much unfairness out there in the world. I saw a Channel 6 report about orphans in Africa last night that was just heartbreaking."

"Yeah, they did that to me too," Andy told Eve when she visited him at college. "They have their way of seeing the world and they want you to see it the same way."

"But how can I choose when that's all I know?" Eve said. "There's more than 500 channels now, each with their own president and the only time I see anything other than six or 13 is at school or when I go to Sandra's house for dinner."

"Her parents still following that kook with the lab coat and the chalkboard?"

"Yeah."

"I thought about going with him for awhile," Andy said. "Seemed like all his line graphs about the economy might piss dad off most. Especially on the days when he wears the sweater-vest instead of the lab coat. But then I found sweet, sweet, President Bertha."

"Didn't you ever just want to turn it off?"

"Of course. I think everyone wants to for awhile."

"So why not?"

"Lots of reasons."

"Like?"

"Well, for one, it's going to happen anyway," Andy said. "And once you realize it's inevitable, you might as well take part."

"But if we all turned it off—

"Eve, that's just not going to happen."

"It could."

"It won't."

Eve gave Andy the cold look of disappointment she normally saved for her younger sister's professions of love for various pop stars.

"Look, I'm not trying to rain on your parade," Andy said, apologetically. "It's just the truth. My friend, Cecilia tried it, you know. Said it pretty much cut her off from everything. When you turn off, the linked social networks are gone. So is your connection to what's happening in the rest of the country, and the world. She couldn't even do her homework because there wasn't any way to do research unless she went to Montana to do fieldwork, which she couldn't do because she'd have to turn back on to buy travel vouchers. Plus, the last time she'd seen Channel 45, it had said there was a war in Montana. The only way turning off would make any difference is if everyone did it at once, and if we could get everyone to agree to do anything together, then we wouldn't need 500 odd presidents in the first place."