Last week I spent several days with friends (D. and M.) at the University of Vermont in Burlington. She's a social historian. He's a German professor and the founder of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the university. They are passionately committed to social justice. They are both the kind of professors that any university wants: great in the classroom, well-published and dedicated to creating public discourse beyond the bricks of the university.

At dinner on the last evening, at one of those boutique flatbread pizza joints where the pizza delivers everything but tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperoni, I asked D. what it would take to save America. He thought for a long time while I tried to determine if that was feta or a shiitake mushroom reduction (on pizza!), and drank my microbrewed designer beer. Then he said, "There would have to be an end to television."

Alas, I was hoping for something simple like national energy independence.

We all agreed that television is the ultimate drug. M. reported that scientific studies show that the relaxation one feels in sitting in front of a television is second only to the deepest REM sleep. D. said that if the average American has X hours of discretionary time per day (D. said 5, M. 2.75 - there was a brief and acrimonious dispute), and if those hours are spent watching television, that means that the time in which hard-working Americans could be tending to the health of their souls or bodies is lost to utter mindlessness - or worse. D. said that television (even when it does not involve lewd innuendo or scantily clad women) is a kind of bourgeois pornography designed to erode the dignity of humankind. (Oh, come on! Has he seen "Three's Company"?)

D. went on to say, as I shot furtive glances at one of the five widescreen television sets in the restaurant, that even though we all know that television is essentially about advertising - persuading us to purchase that which we really don't need to fill whatever void we find in our lives - we still forget that that's what television is really about and so we become robots instead of citizens, poets, lovers, friends, craftsmen or good parents. M. said that when FCC Chairman Newton Minow said (in 1961) that television is a "vast wasteland," he could not know just how wastelandy television would become in the era of reality TV, sexcoms, 24-hour news cycles, etc.

This is not the kind of conversation you want on the eve of Super Bowl weekend.

In the abstract, I heartily agree that television is evil. How much better to sit serenely with a glass of wine reading "Anna Karenina" or "Great Expectations." Or listening to Bach or Mozart or the Beatles, for that matter. Or knitting, crocheting, quilting, tatting, cross-stitching or executing beadwork. Or how about getting up out of the chair and taking some exercise, preferably outside, as my trainer Melanie Carvell keeps advocating (I cannot for the life of me understand why she is so lean, cheerful and healthy).

I do not acknowledge that I am a television addict. I have never robbed a liquor store to pay my cable bill, for example. Nor have I gotten into a bar fight over which hockey game belongs on the main screen. I have no physical scars from a lifetime of bad entertainment choices. It is true that if I had every hour that I have wasted watching TV back, I could learn Sanskrit, or read the complete works of Trollope or Twain or Tolstoy (those long-winded geniuses). Probably I could, with that time, have walked around the world.

But when I am too tired to read, but not tired enough to sleep, I confess to surfing the cable line-up in an almost continuous loop, pausing to see who's on Letterman, watching one segment of one of the myriad of CSIs, lingering (in disgust and pious indignation) as I go past the Girls Gone Wild ads, round and round and round until my fingers are just too weary to go on.

On Super Bowl Sunday morning, I turned on my kitchen-based TV for "just a minute" to see who was on "Meet the Press." And though I don't remember anything after that, except waking up 14 hours later with a B-52 hangover in a giant vat of guacamole dip, it brought me to the following defense of television.

Ralph Nader was on one of the Sunday talk shows promoting his new book "Seventeen Traditions." Asked whether he would "spoil" the 2008 election as he "spoiled" the 2000 one, he gave a simple, dignified and compelling defense of third party campaigns. He reminded us that third parties (from the original 1856 Republicans to Roosevelt's Bull Moose run in 1912) have been the main source of new ideas in our political system. And he asked why it is regarded as outrageous for a concerned citizen to take on what he regards as the two corrupt "corporate parties" in a nation that says it prizes idealism and individualism. Of the 17 traditions his family taught him, he said "civic engagement" is the most important.

On another show, a former CIA agent and a New York Times reporter who has spent more time in Baghdad than any American official, gave an analysis of the pandemonium we have unleashed in Iraq so chilling that it made me wonder how we can even think about football. They said that the huge present chaos in Iraq may be merely the first small sparks of a conflagration in the Middle East that will propel literally millions of people into the streets with guns, explosive devices, sticks and stones, and possibly nuclear weapons.

Giant world-shattering conflicts, they said, are always waiting for Archduke Francis Ferdinand to be assassinated in Sarajevo, and from those seemingly small occurrences the world is forever changed. We don't know yet, they said, what cataclysm we may have touched off. (But when will Prince be performing?)

On still another show, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is seeking the presidency, said, "If we really want peace in the world, the best thing we can do is become an energy-secure nation." I actually had to get up out of my La-Z-Boy when I heard that. To my mind, that is the most intelligent sentence uttered on the American political scene for many a year.

Then I saw a few minutes of a pre-game show, though not the one called "The Road to the Super Bowl," which followed each team through the entire 16-game season, play after play after play, with a lyrical tribute to the Cinderella New Orleans Saints. This one had an interview with Dan Marino, one of that small group of Hall of Fame quarterbacks who have never won the championship. In a thoughtful, even heartbreaking moment, he said he always attends pre-game events, even at the stadium, but that he leaves the arena before kickoff to watch the game alone in the privacy of his own home. He simply cannot stomach being in the stadium to see others play for the ultimate prize.

My point is that, for all of the mind-numbing, soul-destroying schlock on TV, there also are things of great value, that get at the core of our moment in history, global and local, grave and not so grave, and that our lives would be diminished without such moments.

In the end, I was only able to watch one play of the 41st Super Bowl. I apologize, Super Bowl XLI. A guy I had never heard of named Devin Hester, who by the way is now immortal, ran back the opening kickoff for a touchdown. Statisticians rushed in to say that a miracle of this magnitude has never occurred before in Super Bowl history. At that instant, when all of humanity was thinking the same thing - finally, a Super Bowl worth actually watching - I was called away by unmistakably serious life business, and I saw no more.

If the rest of the game was epitomized in that opening play, it must have been some Super Bowl.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)