Telethon

Recently I was involved in an archaic form of entertainment(?), the telethon. A telethon, in case you've been in a coma on a distant planet without cable for the last seventy years, consists of people begging and screaming at you to donate money between musical or comedy acts that make you wish they'd get back to begging and screaming at you for money.

Telethons differ from pledge breaks on Public Television in that the pledge breaks interrupt nothing entertaining, just the usual BBC documentaries and dreary BBC costume dramas where as nothing stops a telethon.

In the past these endless juggernauts of entertainment mediocrity aimed to wipe out diseases, cerebral palsy, arthritis and muscular dystrophy spring to mind. I have participated in telethons for Muscular Dystrophy, Arthritis and Easter Seals although I never understood why a concerted effort against piniped aquatic mammals was necessary or how they ever became associated with the resurrection of our Lord and Savior. And let me say with added emphasis I have nothing against the people fighting cerebral palsy but they never asked.

Lately with Arthritis apparently eradicated and Easter Seals exterminated I help out on the MDA or Jerry Lewis Telethon and a relative new comer on the Telethonic scene, the Armenia Telethon. It is a valiant and successful effort to raise money to pay for infrastructure and educational facilities in impoverished areas of Armenia.

Armenia is a small country in the Caucasus that has a view of Turkey (The Country) from every window, this would be less distressing if the Turks hadn't spent the best part of WW1 trying to exterminate the Armenians. To put it in perspective the Armenians regard their occupation by the Soviet Union as more or less benign, Stalin and Communism were apparently less lethal to the average Armenian than a determined Turk so we are talking some hard backed persecution vets here. At any rate, for 12 hours on Thanksgiving they raise money in prodigious amounts for their homeland, paying for new roads and schools so the Russians and Turks will have new things to destroy next time they decide to go Genocidal.

All this Telethon talk has reminded me of the time I did an Amish Telethon. We had to go door to door but we raised eighty seven dollars and a barn.








You see the Amish don't have telephones or television, so they'd have to go next door to a Mennonite family that had those things to call in. I'll explain the Amish in a latter blog.