Not that the networks don’t try to entice you with clever special effects and the purported highly unusual filmed circumstances of reality television which has in fact become so common that I never realized how screwed up reality really is, and that the boundaries of fiction have become so blurred that the script writers all threw up their hands and left the subject matter to the incapable hands of anybody who happens to own a video camera and the laxative companies who have a direct interest in the outcome of the public’s seemingly infallible interest in a broad range of series that could only be loosely described as entertainment.

Programs such as beauty contests for exceptionally bratty toddlers who are driven by their ditzy neurotic mothers in pursuit of trinket awards after spending thousands dollars in entries and costumes. These are the same toddlers who in just a few short years appear on a different show where fat women try to choose a wedding dress as their idiot fiancées fight with the rest of the wedding party over whether or not the bride’s cleavage conflicts with her butt roll before storming off the set and onto the set of “Bridezillas” perpetuating the myth that a wedding is a happy occasion, which somehow gets lost in the glow of watching swamp people try to catch alligators and with people filling up their homes with 40 years worth of junkyard collecting and garbage lamenting the fact that the health department frowns on such behavior because it competes with the time that they need to stay two steps ahead of the fifteen different TV hosts pandering food prepared by food trucks, drive-ins, and ethnic restaurants serving goat eyes.

A profound wasteland has emerged, a vast litter box full of hard candy, although I suspect it was there all along just for the looking. I don’t know why I expected more.

Copyright 2011 Patrick Granfors