Last year I was hooked on the reality show, Rock of Love. I’m sure you’ve seen it — the episodic saga of a dozen drunk broads locked in a bachelor pad (featuring a stripper’s pole and a mojito bar) fighting it out tooth-and-acrylic-nail for the love of Bret Michaels, former front man for the ’80s hair band, Poison.
I learned a lot from that show. I learned that, while the bad girl stripper makes it to the final two-cat fight in the thunderdome, it’s the good girl that will win. I learned that it’s a bad idea to get a guy’s name tattooed on the back of your neck in 3-inch high letters. I learned that Bret Michaels is very short, has diabetes, and never takes off his headband which raises serious speculations about the exact location of his hairline. And, for all that, I’d still say yes if he said those five magic words to me: Will you rock my world?
I also learned that reality TV plugs right into that huge army of starving dopamine receptors I carry around in my brain after years of class 5 drug abuse.
Would Bret ask Sarah Palin to rock his world? Doubtful.
No wonder that, this year, I’m totally strung out on Election ‘08, the Crack of Current Events. I’m mainlining this shit. For more hours than I care to admit, I’ve got the TV on–toggling between CNN and MSNBC and PBS–I’m reading four online newspapers (and, unlike Sarah Palin, I can name them), and I’m checking the polls more often than Bret checks his insulin levels. I send and receive emails on the McPainlin clown show. And I start ranting about them to strangers, bringing a distinctly Irish aura of brooding, boozy outrage to many a social occasion.
Most fascists are hilarious — in retrospect. Watch an old newsreel of Hitler or Mussolini speechifying. It’s like the Marx brothers. The McGeezer and his Fembot, too, are risible. They’re like a caricature of a presidential ticket. All that aw shucks, you betcha, change is coming my friends — whilst they are planning to f**k us all on the war, the economy, health care, reproductive rights, the environment, clean energy, gay/human rights, evolution . . .
It would be funny, if the entire future of America — and, to a large degree, Planet Earth — weren’t hanging in the balance. It’s the suspense that’s killing me. With only one month left to go, it’s looking good. But I’m still brushing up on my French, just in case.
Just think of the education system we could have under Palin -- our pregnant teens can learn about creationism in between Rapture Drills. That's country first.
