Raised on big breasts and beer

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Jon Ward

No, I didn't think so. How about testing your theory that one could subsist on Guinness and water - and nothing else - for months at a time? Or perhaps it's going out with friends, violently distorting your body into strange positions to the beat of some pulsing synthetic drum, exchanging familiar words on familiar topics with people whose names you know, consuming food, and so forth. And maybe it's going to a crowded place full of drunken insecure people looking to get laid, and attempting to imbibe as much alcohol as you can while spanking yourself from atop a table while galloping around on a broom before you pass out, and wake up the next morning smelling like vomit and wearing clothes you've never seen before.

More often though, you likely engage in far more nefarious acts of debasement and stagnation, like watching TV and going to the movies. We, the American people, spend a significant portion of our lives sitting on our ever-widening asses watching other people pretend to live made up lives. In the offices across the country the morning's topic of conversation is no doubt last night's insultingly stupid sitcom. How do we relate to our fellow Americans? Upon what common ground do we stand together, united as countrymen? Well, you saw Melrose Place or Baywatch the other night, right?

And we have made it that way -you, specifically. If you indiscriminately watch the bullshit, it's your fault. You're responsible for this mindless drivel gorging our minds on cheesy jokes about sex, gun-toting muscle-bound idiots killing corny bad guys, emaciated brainless sluts engendering sick ideals of feminine beauty, and who's sleeping with whom this week?

TV has always been mindless trash as long as I've been around, but it keeps getting worse because we demand little or nothing from it. Just show me some explosions and some cleavage, let me drink my beer and go to sleep. I have to get up and go to work tomorrow. And with a bad actortaste.

TV could be thought-provoking and informative, and some shows are, but nobody watches them. It's boring, right? I think I have the Discovery Channel or something, but why would I want to watch a show about how life arose on earth and how humans evolved into such creative creatures when I could watch that creativity in practice in the form of nearly naked plastic and silicone cyborg blondes bustily bouncing along the beach, all cleverly hidden between insulting car and beer commercials, all telling you that you're not good enough. You need to go buy this. Then you'll be cool or happy, or whatever it is you want to be.

And if you're lapping that filth up, then you're not good enough. You are perpetuating our descent into a commercial world where there are no individual identities. You, like your kids, grow up piecing your personality together out of brainless cheesy TV characters into a hideous conglomeration of unoriginality. I don't know you, but I bet I can relate to you immediately because our identities are a patchwork of Magnum P.I.s, Michael Knights, Hulk Hogans, Ice Cubes, Bart Simpsons, Fresh Princes and Beavis and Buttheads, We were both suckled by the same cathode ray nipple, raised by the same electronic baby sitter, bred to be the same consumer.

The only way to change this maelstrom of media atrophy is have some respect for yourself. Is that really all it takes to please and entertain you? Watching sorry old plots rehashed over and over? People killing and screwing each other, making bad jokes about sexual orientation and obesity? If you stop watching the worthless bullshit they pump out, they'll have to think of something better. And if they don't - screw them. You can do better things with your time.

Well anyway, I have to go. There's a rerun of The Real World coming on soon.

Jon Ward is an astronomy and creative writing junior and can be reached via e-mail at Jon.Ward@wildcat.arizona.edu. His column Who's the Bull Goose Looney? appears every Thursday.