The album is partly based on and gets its title from a book by Neil Postman entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Its message is pretty much the same: don't watch television. It also talks about how and why TV is not good for anything but entertainment and how it has served to monumentally shorten attention spans. Reasonably good reading if you're interested in the subject and not very long.

Postman, Neil (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin.

A noder above notes that the album applied eerily well to the Gulf War when it came out. Ten years later, it also applied eerily well to NATO's actions against Serbia. I suspect that it will apply just as well to wherever we send our troops next.

Watching TV is one of my favorite songs.

Also, Marv Albert makes an appearance as himself to do a play-by-play of a Mideastern skirmish on Perfect Sense