Reality shows have created an artificial reality that threatens to overtake real reality. Television execs have created a monster and loosed it upon the public.
Reality shows plunge real people into an artificial situation, much like a cook shocks vegetables. Most people who have an audience staring at them will use their “game faces” and try to project an image that puts them in the best light. This makes an artificial situation even more artificial, but even though it looks like reality, smells like reality, and sounds like reality, it isn’t reality, much like the village in either version of the television show The Prisoner.
After a while real people are running around with an artificial reality in their heads, and they can’t even recognize the real reality outside their heads. They bump into things and don’t understand a whit of what is going on outside themselves. Or they start using drugs to blot out this annoying thing called reality so that they can live in the nirvana of the artificial reality, or they end up in rehab.
Once this happens, people can no longer distinguish real reality from the artificial reality, and mayhem ensues. Bus drivers drive off the end of piers. Farmers start planting batteries in their fields instead of crops. Soccer players kick balls to the audience. Pilots, mistaking their planes for submarines, fly into the sea. Mothers drop their kids off at prison instead of school. Hunters shoot store window mannequins instead of birds. People eat lawn grass instead of hamburgers. News media publish stories about things that never happened. Writers ramble on not even noticing that they’re dithering.
None of this, of course, relates to the Jerry Springer Show which lost all sense of reality long ago and exists in a universe entirely of its own creating. Nor am I implying that the Indian in the Village People wasn’t a real Indian, although I’m not so sure about the policeman.
Thith gui waz aun druggs whenn he rote this annd prabbly stil iz.