10.19.12
One reason I gave up cable
Basic cable, as Media Matters notes today, is rotted. It features a slew of name channels, all doing reality shows which range from intelligence-insulting to the outright nauseating. They cater to the worst of bottom-out-of-sighters in the country, most notably this year, the total dogshite demographic called “preppers.”
Or part of the Ted Nugent/Psychopath Vote.
Distilled, from Media Matters:
If one scene defines last week’s premiere of Ted Nugent’s Gun Country, set in the survivalist-thick scrublands surrounding Waco, Texas, it is the show’s unnervingly giddy and pony-tailed host standing behind a .50-caliber Browning armor-piercing machine gun and blowing a bunch of holes in the four-inch reinforced steel door used by a team of local “preppers” to protect their bunker armory against an attack of the undead. Neither the machine gun nor the vault hatch fills any conceivable civilian-defense need ….
It’s the sort of weapon you’d expect to see wielded with glee in a Dawn of the Dead remake …
The Pet Psychic is A Brief History of Time compared to many of the shows now airing on the channel. In recent years Discovery has joined other companies in its former documentary niche in largely abandoning in-depth science programming in favor of its antipode, what might best be called anti-science: shows that glorify stupidity and celebrate a giggling, Beavis and Butthead-style pleasure in blowing stuff up and killing things …
‘[The] arrival of Ted Nugent on [the Disovery] roster is a new low suggestive of just how much more socially destructive television can become,” it continues.
Read the rest. It’s thoroughly depressing, but an excellent supercilious takedown.
Preppers — from the archives.