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The jury has spoken and now some nurse goes home with a million dollars. Along the way, she learned all about "life". Some guy got burned like a french fry. Meanwhile, over in the bowels of MTV, teenage girls got sprayed with fecal matter. A commercial blares that your drinking water may be poison. Man is killed after a high speed chase. Full story at eleven.Such is the bleeding edge of television. It used to be the "cutting edge". Then some yahoo in a suit came up with "bleeding edge". The idea was that the envelope would be pushed even further. Now, with nowhere left to go, we try to push even more. You can't really go more than a bleeding edge. The only thing left to do is to lick it.
Let's lick the bleeding edge and cut our tongues. We'll lick the bleeding edge and let the blood flow.
In the race to be the most disgusting, the television suits lose sight of what we, the people, really want.
Sex.
I want sex on television. I have no interest in spraying people with human waste. I don't care if someone is the weakest link in the chain. I want to see human relations up close and personal. I want people arguing and making love and getting high and eating potato chips. But we're not going to get that. Instead, we'll get people being burned alive and being deprived of food for the sake of some game. We've got that in real life already, by the way. All we have to do is set up a camera somewhere in Africa. It would be even better television because those people are also being deprived of basic human rights. That's entertainment.
Yeah, we can do that. Do up a survivor show where we deprive people of human rights. We'll put them on trial without habeas corpus and then fry the pigs. That's really entertainment.
It'll happen. We'll end up killing someone on t.v. just like in Paddy Chayefsky's "Network". It's the final frontier. "Faces of Death III" meets Wally and the Beaver. So, what would the death look like? I think we'll see more accidental deaths first. Some guy will fall into a lava pit or something on one of these reality shows. We're already leading up to it. I've seen the Karl Walenda footage. Man on a tightrope falls to his death. We're being set up for the coup de grace.
Is it too late? Can we reverse this?
No, it's over. Free love and pot lost out to Reaganomics and "just say no". We're at the mercy of those who want nothing more than to turn us into venomous hate-mongers. They keep feeding us violence and want to desensitize us. We're being turned into robot soldiers who have no feelings towards one another. Death and sadism are becoming commonplace in our lives. It's Medieval. We're regressing to the dark ages when a mentally incompetent fool would be brought in to entertain the lords and ladies. Whip the pig! Draw some blood on his idiotic back! Pass me a drumstick.
I await love. Beautiful love with soft curves and a bedroom face. Hair tussled and a sleepy stretch. Caring and holding and caressing.
But, alas, it is not to be.
The networks are going to make us lick the razor. Frankly, I'd rather be licking other things.
Justin Braveman is a film student and all around slacker from the Seattle area.
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