The television tells me no one has any money and I believe them because they play me a particularly persuasive montage of FOR SALE signs and deserted malls and confused-looking homeless people. This is the first recession (or worse?) brought to you with FULL TEAM COVERAGE — we can watch it live, in hi-definition, every minute of every day. It’s like the Olympics but with an exponentially longer, yet untraceable tape delay. We can watch banks turn away outstretched hands, bankrupt auto executives weep in $XXXX suits, foreclosed houses overrun with tumbleweeds and bobcats and fat Midwestern-looking factory workers moving what appear to be levers. All the while waiting for that breaking news banner to flash across the screen with the much-dreamed-of subtitle, “REPORT: RECESSION OVER.”

I remember learning that the Vietnam War was undoubtedly shaped by the fact that dead soldiers joined American families for dinner each night in televised form. I can’t shake the feeling that what FULL TEAM COVERAGE will do to the current Collapse will one day be taught to high school students. What will the lesson be?

Will it concern our president? How he used the TEAM to sell his stimulus package. How he did so by traveling to an Indiana small town he used as a symbol of, naturally, an Indiana small town. How he did so with the help of confrontations with both a gentle-looking homeless woman who was subsequently given a house and a shrieking, unqualified wannabe D.J. who was subsequently offered various radio industry internships. How he chose to sign the bill in Denver, as if to indicate that this package is both important and symbolically analogous to the Rocky Mountains.

Or will it concern the negligence of the TEAM? How after some time it lost interest in the Collapse and turned to lighter things. How it tried to ignore the Collapse by concerning itself with a veritable freak show — with the eight babies who, like a clown’s never-ending scarf, slithered out of their mother one after another. Or with the 13 year old Briton who sat with his newborn daughter wedged between his arms, his hands gripping a Playstation controller tightly and his concentrated eyes hardened to the television as a paparazzi stole a photograph of the scene. Or with the high-profile rhythm and blues singer (and gum salesman) who police say not only battered his equally high-profile girlfriend, but left bite marks on her fingers.

(Note that my dismissal of these news items as “lighter things” isn’t exactly fair. I find the weight of these news stories decidedly heavy. What these stories say about us is, given enough consideration, terrifying. And the fact that the American people have responded to these stories with, above all else, amusement mirroring the conditioned mindless response to consumer entertainment, is equally terrifying.)

Or will it be the same as the Vietnam lesson? How Americans, bombarded with images of the desperate and depressed, saturated with ill-seeming headlines, become self-aware and appropriately outraged. How they used this outrage to demand that those in power use their weight to break the fall of the Collapse. How they did so, in part, out of the desire to rid their televisions and websites of the annoying, uncomfortable images of sweaty, scared stock brokers, unfamous-looking corporate bosses and the upper-bodies of Congressmen who are tolerable on a television special every couple years but lack the comedic eccentricities and unpredictable dialogue to amuse on a week-in/week-out basis. Seems unlikely that we’d rise up in protest as our hippie forebears did.

Or will it be a history lesson? How the Collapse was the beginning of an age literally dominated by visual media. How, forced back into their living rooms by potential poverty, fear and peer pressure, all Americans became seduced by the power of the televised image. How the increased Internet usage by job-hunters coincided with a boom in efficient, frugal websites offering services in all aspects of life, thus making Americans happily reliant on the World Wide Web. Seems a bit too much like a science-fiction movie. (Although the film industry and its tributaries are one of the few industries that cable news commentators and online magazine writers discuss as “recession proof.” Netflix posted PROFITS last quarter. Slumdog Millionaire — love, money and fame … made possible by a TV show. Sleep — the only singular activity Americans do more often than watch television.)

Or will it be something else? (Read: yes.) Something I can’t muse on because I’m watching a big screen TV with my eyes nanometers from the screen, searching but seeing only varying rectangles of solid color, too close to decipher the total image.