“The TV beast ate us whole.”
Believe it or not, Dennis Miller was once funny … and insightful.
Miller was one of the first popular entertainers — yes, he was once popular as well — who said that the cause of many of our problems was the massive role television was playing in our lives.
That was 25 years ago, and things have gotten much worse. Since Miller talked about what a huge part of our lives TV had become, the abomination of reality shows came along, starting with “Survivor” and “American Idol” and other shows whose chief purpose was allowing viewers to believe they were somehow better off than the people humiliating themselves in front of the cameras.
And as the reality craze became even more popular, Americans got nastier and nastier. In 2011. filmmaker Bob Goldthwait made a film that expressed what an awful lot of people must have been thinking.
Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of some of these reality “stars?”
In “God Bless America,” Goldthwait has his two main characters tour the country killing people who have degraded modern life in our country. Frank is a man who is terminally ill and has reached his breaking point. Roxy is a 16-year-old girl who catches him in the act, finds that she agrees with what he’s doing and becomes his willing accomplice.
Frank explains what he hates about our culture.
“America has become a cruel and vicious place. We reward the shallowest, the dumbest, the meanest and the loudest. We no longer have any common sense of decency. No sense of shame. There is no right and wrong. The worst qualities in people are looked up to and celebrated. Lying and spreading fear is fine as long as you make money doing it.
“We’ve become a nation of slogan-saying, bile-spewing hatemongers. We’ve lost our kindness. We’ve lost our soul. What have we become? We take the weakest in our society, we hold them up to be ridiculed, laughed at for our sport and entertainment.”
It has been a long time since I’ve watched reality TV. Back in the early days of “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” my wife and I enjoyed a couple of seasons. Nicole watched one season of “The Apprentice” and actually came away with a favorable opinion of Trumpers.
Of course, the more she saw of him outside that context, the more she realized what a scumbag he is.
Of course, she’s smarter than the average voter.