Words for the Ages: Line Thirty

"When you trust your television, what you get is what you got."

When John Mayer wrote that lyric for Waiting on the World to Change (2006), which television station(s) do you think he had in mind? Those of us old enough to recall when only a handful of TV stations existed - none of them affiliated with media empire billionaires curating content to ensure we weren't exposed to information that would challenge our worldview - might remember actually trusting much of what we heard on TV. What a quaint notion in an era when TVs assault us 24/7 in every conceivable public space and many people have multiple screens in their homes with angry, divisive pundits incessantly screaming at us to only play in the sandbox with those who share our opinions.    

Arguably, Mayer's lyric may have qualified as words for the ages even in the pre-cable TV era. But there's no question his words fit the 21st century like a glove. And I would submit his words will only grow to be more prescient as our fractured future unfolds. His concise phrase is also of a piece with an oft-repeated layman's definition of insanity: Doing the same thing, the same way, over and over again, and expecting different results. 

I'm not naive enough to think we'll ever return to a time when a phrase like "alternative facts" would make all intelligent people snicker. Sadly, what I'm left with is another phrase I heard years back, a slightly longer version of Mayer's wisdom without a reference to the idiot box, i.e., When you always do what you've always done, you always get what you've always got.