Satans Glowbox

Jerry Springer is the Devil, and if not the actual devil then I am certain he holds high office in hell. Of course it would be inaccurate and reactionary to hold him solely responsible for American culture degenerating into liquid batshit BUT he is riding that wave on a giant turd surfboard.

Excuse me for ranting but I just managed to catch some of the most recent Jerry Springer shows and I feel dirty, dirty and culpable. Dirty because just witnessing that debacle makes me want to scrub my frontal lobe clean with bleach and a metal scouring pad. And culpable because, if I’m completely honest, part of me enjoyed it

For those of you who may not have seen the show in a while there are a number of additions to the usual brain-dead low-rent shoutfest. For a start there is 30% more whooping, this, I suspect, has been achieved by dramatically lowering the mental age of the audience. Either the producers are recruiting the audience from the brain injuries clinic or they are spiking the complementary food with toxic metal like mercury. Either way the effect is the same; hollering drooling simpletons who clap whoop and jeer on cue.

The proceedings are given a vaguely silly air by some unseen force playing sound effects at seemingly random intervals; the weirdest of these is the “ding ding” of a boxing bell. I’m sure this started as a response to the inevitable violence inherent to the shows “I’ve got a shocking secret to tell you” format. But now, curiously, the participants on the show have become so accustomed to this that the bell is actually used as a catalyst, at any time the producers can decide that its going a bit slow, play that sound, and like Pavlov’s dogs the sideshow erupts into flailing limbs, flung wigs, and flying furniture. And nakedness, yes nakedness, the women who appear on the show use taking there clothes of as an act of aggression. Apparently now, in America, ladies during an argument will discard their tops and trousers at the slightest provocation to prove how much of a woman they are.*

”It’s good”, Jerry thinks to himself, alone reclined in his chair of bones sipping from his cut crystal glass of paupers tears and roasting his cloven feet in front of a roaring soul fire “but it could be nastier, more debasing, more – evil.” Then it occurs to him and a wide grin splits his face like cesarean gash.Pole dancers. For no real reason members of the public are allowed to come on the show and pole dance. What have pole dancers got to do with anything? Precisely nothing is the only answer I have.

With the dancing, the fighting, the sound effects, and the nudity its easy to forget that people are actually getting their hearts broken. I had to leave the room when a woman (well child, she was barely out of her teens) found out her childhood sweetheart husband of two years and father of their two year daughter, had been sleeping with her own sister. You could literately see her world collapsing, and Jerry’s response? Well Jerry stopped the action; he took control stop the shouting, calmed everyone down and got one of the security guards to swap glasses with her as a joke because he thought they looked similar.

The American empire has often been compared to the roman empire and now I can see why; its not a huge leap to give these fuckers tridents and nets and let them sort it out to the death.** It’s a shame that a country able to produce such sublime and intelligent entertainment is also able to produce such soul destroying shit

*Womanhood now being measured in folds of fat, bad skin and clumsy tattoos
**I’d watch it