Generally, I keep my television viewing to a minimum - limiting my choices to the local news, PBS and re-runs of The Big Bang Theory (which I watch from "Sheldon's spot" on our living room couch).
Last night I was watching an advertisement from one of the local mattress companies telling me that my eight year old mattress needed to be replaced because of something called dust mites. They assured me that if I paid attention to their pleas, I would be rid of the scourge that are dust mites forever... or at least for another eight years.
I'm not really sure that dust mites live, other than in the imaginations of copy writers who need people to believe in the existence of the little critters in order to sell more mattresses.
I went out and purchased a premium mattress some years back with the idea that a better grade of mattress would obviate the need to purchase a new mattress in a matter of just a few years. The dust mite people went and killed the idea that I could purchase something with better materials and expect it to last longer than just about any pedestrian product.
A monster was invented - a monster by the name of dust mites.
Those very same types of monsters are invented every day for a variety of reasons.
Monsters have become a very pervasive and a very effective way of frightening some of us to do things we might not necessarily do otherwise.
In the past couple of months, for instance, we have been told of the evil Obama monster who will with the stroke of a pen (in the form of an Executive Order) ruin any chance we have of evicting the monster of illegal aliens from our fair shores.
"Unfair!" "Dictatorial!" come the cries of the monster makers, diverting attention from the fact that if they had been doing their jobs in the first place there would have been no need for the Obama monster to take action on his own. Instead, they've been out creating and exploiting new monsters in order to get elected by the small minority of people who even bothered to vote in the last election in the first place.
I wonder how many monsters kept people away from the polls.
The monster of possible vote tampering factored into the mix as did the monster of "liberals" in our midst. "Liberals" = "Blacks" = "The Jews" = "Communists" = "Socialists" = "Nazis" just to name a few of the monsters paraded in front of us so that we could have a focus. "The government", "ISIS", "Islam", "Ebola", "Benghazi", "The Illuminati", "The Bilderberg Group", "Zionists", "Palestinians", and the list grows longer.
Now, my local mattress merchant wants to sell me on the notion that there is a monster called "Dust Mites" infesting my perfectly good mattress.
Right.
And I have some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell to you.
Be Seeing You!
