Netflix has documentaries?

My husband has just gone to bed, so I am sitting next to a crying baby (who has been changed, fed, and otherwise cared for but needs to get rid of energy for a few minutes) and adding movies to my Netflix Instant Queue.  Did you know that Netflix has documentaries?

This is quite a revelation for someone who used to watch documentaries pretty incessantly.  I LOVED A&E Biography and pretty much everything else on A&E in the mid-to-late 1990s.  They would feature historic, important, or notorious figures and provide a serious but in-depth look at each person.  Of course, Biography was also probably the world's #1 employer of people who called themselves "Royal Watchers," but the overall the series was well-crafted and intelligent.  Several years later, I caught Biography... of Paris Hilton and had to check several times to make sure this was Biography on A&E and not just E.

As disappointed as I was with A&E and what they were churning out, I am now so disappointed in myself.  Of all of the movies I could choose on Netflix, I've been scouring the "TV Dramas" section and have "finally" started watching Army Wives.  If my children are going to have a parent who regularly watches television, it appears I could be making better, more intelligent choices.

I have a book (that I have not yet read - probably because of 2 kids and too much Army Wives) called "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)" by Mark Bauerlein, a college professor who is observant but apparently could not choose a single title for his book.  In any case, he makes the point that though the current generation has all kinds of information available to us digitally - art, music, classic literature, historical documentation, scientific research - we are choosing to spend our time connecting to current events and each other.  This keeps us in an anxious state where we are constantly accessing current and incredibly shallow information.  Rather than reading the WWII Speeches of Winston Churchill or George Orwell's complete works, we are on facebook, twitter, and opinion websites.

I don't know that we're completely stupid, but I know we're wasting a lot of time and talent.  I love to write, but I read more than I create and I watch more than I read.  Sometimes it's 4 PM before I know what the weather is like outside.  As much as I try to set limits for my toddler, he's had to close my computer for me on a few occasions, and I've never lost an important work document because of that because more often than not, I'm doing something that can be done later or not at all.

I figure if I am watching TV while folding laundry, it might as well be intelligent TV for an hour rather than the 7th of 23 episodes of a single season of a show I didn't know or care about until I found it on Netflix and put it on my to-do list.  Perhaps I can instill in my child an awareness of a real world out there with different cultures and facts to learn rather than a group of fictional characters living a very dramatic existence in surreality.

I probably will finish Army Wives someday, but I think it's going to be less of a priority now that I've rediscovered the documentaries I've been missing.