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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Sadists savor "Six Feet Under," and Kathy Hilton shows us how to pair a skeazy slut tartlet with a nice chardonnay. Plus: Runaway brides are people, too!
Jun 26, 2005 | Things that make you go "Eww!"
People often ask me how I can maintain any hope for humanity when I watch so much crappy TV week after week. The truth is, it's easier than you think, as long as you avoid certain TV shows. Namely, "The Jerry Springer Show."
But, sadly, like a creepy ex-boyfriend or a moldy block of cheese in the back of the fridge, you can only avoid Springer for so long. True to form, Jerry tracked me down at my podiatrist's office last week. That's right, my podiatrist's office, that fondest of places, where I sit in mortal fear of having my feet scraped or covered in acid or cut up and then cauterized. They have a television on the wall of the waiting room that's perpetually tuned to "Jerry Springer," with a sign under it that says, "Please do not touch the Television."
Now, I know that we're not exactly living in times of great artistic and cultural enlightenment, but what kind of a crazy upside-down world is this, that forcing people to watch "Jerry Springer" doesn't result in an immediate violent uprising?
That day, I watched 38 minutes of "Springer," in a very small, very packed waiting room filled with people who couldn't walk very well and had at least one foot bandaged to the point where it looked like a small ottoman. It was like some tragic ballet: Each time one of the sad humans in Springer's audience leapt up and mustered those few brain cells that survived years of huffing spray paint to form an insult like "If you was a real man, she wouldn'a needed that dyke to make her happy!" one of the sad humans in the waiting room would be called in by the nurse, lurch to his feet and weave around the other bandaged ottomans to get to her.
The word "unpleasant" doesn't really do the experience justice. After a while, I started to suspect that either I was the subject of some sort of wildly unethical social experiment, or I was the lead character in a novel written by some sadistic French existentialist. And just as I began to lose my mind in earnest, just as a mother on "Springer" shouted at her daughter, "You've had so many men's pricks in you, you look like a porcupine!" the guy next to me pulled out one of those plastic dental floss devices and started flossing his teeth.
Look, I'm no snob. I watch "Dancing With the Stars" without the requisite degree of ironic distance. I try as best I can to laugh along with the bad joke that American culture has become. But when you really take a close look and see how complacent we all are in the total annihilation of any standards of quality or decency or taste, it's pretty impossible not to imagine that we're at the start of a very rapid descent downward, to the bottom of the global barrel -- you know, where we belong?
And this concerns me. Because once we reach the bottom and we no longer have the power to bully the international community with our military invasions and our humorless movie stars and our crappy franchise restaurants, what will become of us? That's right -- you know where I'm going with this -- we might have to go out and get real jobs, jobs that involve real work, like harvesting grapes or building dams or something. I mean, once we stop exporting Applebee's nacho platters and plug-in room deodorizers and spray-tanned jackasses, do you really think they'll be paying people like me to watch television?
