The Springer Green Room and the Reelection of George W. Bush

"America is the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in between." Oscar Wilde

I confess that I am sometimes transfixed by fleeting glimpses of the "Jerry Springer Show." There I am, surfing through, when suddenly I see Jerry's industrial-chic set, the dull green colors, the propellers turning slowly in their cages behind the "guests" -- and some obese woman with long blonde hair, wearing a bad-idea short dress with a plunging neckline, is boo-hooing to Jerry about her no-good boyfriend who she strongly suspects has been sleeping with her aunt. For some reason the fat blonde with her blurred features and uncertain dentition has taken off her shoes, and her fat feet are flat on the floor, up there on the raised platform before the howling mob which is Jerry's studio audience. And of course next up is the aunt, who is an older version of the first slob, stringier hair maybe, and a bad dye-job at that -- she charges on to the stage, also wearing a short skirt, and then immediately shucks her shoes, and without preliminaries she charges the first gal, her niece, I guess the story line has it -- and they wrestle and throw each other to the floor while the body guards halfheartedly pull them apart, and black-out squares keep us from seeing the exposed tits and ass which the audience - now chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" --can see plainly, in all their immense immediacy. Every other screamed word from the brawling aunt and niece is bleeped, as they spit epithets at each other, call each other whores and sluts, all the while throwing wild punches and pulling the other's hair. And then, of course, the boyfriend himself, with his burr haircut and tattoos and a forehead two inches high, and his dentition only a distant memory -- he walks out to screams of excoriation from the crowd, who've gotten the word on this slimebag. The aunt hugs him nonetheless, says she loves him, and the betrayed niece, her face a ruin of tears and smeared mascara, starts screaming at him, why, why, why?

Why indeed? Often, in these stories, we hear there are one or two children involved, maybe the first tub o' lard and the boyfriend were blessed with issue, or maybe it was the aunt all along, and the first blonde has been, unwittingly, raising her own cousin, somehow mistaken about her own pregnancy and delivery.

In the Chronicle today, I read that the American nuclear family, for the first time in our history, has fallen below the 25% mark. People living as husband and wife with children in one home now number about 23% of the American populace. Increasingly, this kind of family life is the exclusive province of the well-educated and well-off. Marriage and children are luxuries which most young Americans simply can't afford, if they were inclined to consider the lifestyle in the first place. Children might happen willy-nilly, from any kind of union at all, long-term or in passing, maybe incognito. Maybe the first reunion of the family would happen in the Jerry Springer Green Room.

It's not all a waste of time, to spend ten minutes with Jerry & the trailer park folks. I'm convinced that more and more of us, those of us who consider ourselves educated, aware, well-read, walk around with a vision in our heads of a fantasy America which either never existed, or has been so transmuted by the last forty years that it may as well never have existed. The columnists in the few major newspapers left (the New York and Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post), the ever-shrinking major weeklies, like Time and Newsweek, pitch their stories to this fantasy America, one peopled by a vast population of well-educated, well-adjusted Moms and Dads in good-paying jobs, their children at sleek, high-functioning schools, with money in the bank and their finances under control, the car paid for, the lawn mowed, the house clean, their lives tidy. And then, lumbering to stage center, upsetting this idyllic reverie, is the 230 lb., 5 foot 2 inch harridan with the maroon tank top and jeans skirt hiked up over her thong, her dirty blonde hair flying as she throws her sister-in-law to the ground for sleeping with her toothless husband while the two of them were working the night shift at Wal-Mart and thought she wouldn't never hear about it -- well, now she knows, you whore, you skank, you slut, you god****, m************ b****, and you can have his scraggly ass 'cause I done changed the locks on the double-wide anyway!

When I gaze upon such things, I think: even if they don't exist quite that way, even if some of it is done for effect, these people are still so absolutely devoid of self-esteem, so clueless, so obtuse, they are willing to allow themselves to be portrayed as hopeless losers in front of a national audience for what probably isn't much money, even to them. And a calm tranquility descends upon my perfervid soul. For in such moments of Trailer Park Satori, I see it. I see my own delusions, the sociological maya of my imagining, why I beat myself up asking the same question as the skanky blonde fatso: why, why, why?

Bush was appointed in 2000, as we all know; he didn't win the popular vote, and his brother cheated down in Florida to put Bush in position to allow two members of the Supreme Court with serious conflict of interest problems to stop the recount before Gore could win the electoral count outright. We know that. But 2004 - Bush got millions of votes more than Kerry, and 53% of the total. And this happened after Bush had been in office for four years, and his incompetence, his clownish bungling, his intellectual and emotional ineptitude were obvious for all to see. He started a war on completely false information before the campaign for reelection was even underway. Well, all those residents of that fantasy America we conjure, that we pull out of the clear blue sky -- they surely could have seen it. And there is only one problem, the dilemma definitively, irrefutably, crushingly presented by November 2004 -- that America, if it ever was, could not possibly exist anymore. The great majority who returned Bush to office in 2004 believed that Saddam Hussein was the principal cause of 9/11. They thought the guy who allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place was the best guy to protect us from the terrors, which he described in his fractured English, still to come. They were enthusiastic about voting for a candidate, here in the 21st Century, who maintains "the jury is out" on whether evolution theory is accurate or not, who does everything he can to retard America's scientific progress, who has made the U.S.A. a worldwide pariah with his bestial approach to prisoners of war, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for America's benighted "response" to the looming catastrophe of climate change.

Oh yes, the Green Room has its cognates, its counterparts out there in the Real World of Modern America. Epidemic obesity and diabetes, plummeting literacy, a huge cohort who use America's emergency rooms as their primary care physician. People completely wrapped up in the business of scraping by with crap jobs and crappier living conditions. And the response of the Bushies, as always, is PR: to hide the steady growth of the underclass with misleading statistics which conceal the growing disparity between the Haves and the Havenothings.

America goes on changing nonetheless. There's a new show on now, and the Americans on the program inhabit the United States from sea to shining sea. The people who play are taking one last drag before stamping the butt on the Green Room floor, knocking back one more Red Bull to juice up for the combat ahead, fluffing the mullet before charging out the door to the arena. They're getting ready to kick off those shoes and have at it.