These days the fare on satellite TV is so bad I wonder that Waste Management doesn’t start buying them out. My daily routine is to go through specific areas of the guide and see if there’s anything I want to record. Maybe about 3/4 of the time, that’s a “no” (if I’m being fairly restrained) or a “good lord, look at all these oceans of bullshit” (more frequently). Not feeling it.

I’m sensitive to names. One thing that bothers me more than the average person is a deliberately misleading or falsely titillating title. If the title is also imbecilic, that’s even worse. And here we are with this show, which airs on the Ancient Aliens Channel. Or the Pawnshop Channel. Or the Does Real Evidence Confirm my Religion Channel. That’s what a cesspool History has become, and it somewhat reflects the general trend of national mentality in that it’s gotten a lot dumber.

So when I saw America’s Book of Secrets on the ex-History Channel, I gave it a look in spite of the ridiculous name and premise. I feel for the hosts (especially Lance Reddick, who was one hell of an actor), having to play to that notion and act as if he could possibly believe there were such a thing. No one with an MFA from Yale could possibly be that vacuous. (A Yalie Bachelor’s with a Gentleman’s C is quite a different story, as we rather ruinously learned.)

How do I know that? BECAUSE THE VERY CONCEPT IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE. I don’t raise my voice very often, but that question would merit it. The idea that there is any sort of literary repository where our overlords have gathered together all the hidden truths and naughty deeds doesn’t even give said overlords credit for basic intellect and common sense. For most of my lifetime, at least, that was unfair to them. They might be greedy, they might be evil, they might be enemies of democratic institutions and traditions, but they were never moronic enough to contemplate this. What if it got out? The best way to assure that it did would be to aggregate it all in one easily copied volume. Even if our leaders would be that stupid, the members of our intelligence community would not be.

The closest that happened was probably when the post-Watergate funk led the then-Director of Central Intelligence to order his agency to ralph up every dirty deed they knew about. This report was called the Family Jewels, and it made a nice post-inauguration present for Gerald Ford. Yeah, that was something like a book of secrets, but it wasn’t all the secrets; it was just the ones that involved activity outside the agency’s charter (pandering to the amusing notion that such a charter is ever allowed to get in the way of whatever it is they were told to do). It was a sheaf of paper of some secrets, which is not rare currency around intelligence agencies. Big deal–well, at the time it was. A bunch of people lost their innocence and realized that even republics with rules have intelligence agencies that violate those rules daily. Pearls were clutched with a powerful clutching.

The show itself is rather good, if you can get past the misleading title and its fundamental insult to the intellect. There’s some conspiracy stuff here and there–some pretty silly, some at least not offensive to the intellect–and the hosts keep on mentioning the show’s title (production must be writing the script so that they keep hammering on this dumbth). They explore some interesting (and often horrifying) outcomes, groups, events. Now and then I actually see something that sounds worth the trouble to verify.

So what’s the big deal about a title? Because this is how short attention spans are manipulated. You’ve seen plenty of online news headlines with titles that had little relation to the articles’ content. Do you think that was an accident? Ha. Was it sinister? Only to the degree that you consider clickbait and deliberate misleading to be sinister. Often such misleading is euphemistic because the reality or association became unsavory. Take The Hemlock Society, which used to advocate for the right to kill oneself. Now it’s ‘rebranded’ as Compassion & Choices, focused on “legislative change” that’s never going to come on the national level. Over time, a different name reprograms the way people look at a thing. The advertising world knows this and does it better than anyone, which is why I avoid every drop of advertising I can.

So yeah, I like the show but resent the title. I resent it because it carries the fundamental implication that I’d be idiot enough to believe there were such a thing as America’s book of secrets.