Steeply's father and M*A*S*H (pp. 638–639)
‘My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn’t pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it was about.’
Context
This is the theme's crucial proof-of-concept, and Steeply plants it as a personal anecdote before either man clocks it as an argument. His father was consumed to death by "a plain old television program" — not a lethal cartridge, not the AFR's fissile object, just broadcast MAS*H, "broadcast television and—the passivity." If an ordinary syndicated sitcom, watched by an ordinary heating-oil dispatcher, can produce the full pathology of immersion, withdrawal, and terminal obsession, then the appetite the Entertainment exploits was already native to the audience decades before anyone built the weapon. The lethal object doesn't create the hunger; it perfects the delivery of a hunger the population brought to the couch on its own.