America: White-Trash Nation

There are days when I think I might have been so much better off if I had never left the trailer park. Days when I am totally convinced that I am the only real human being on earth surrounded by aliens from a foreign land. Or maybe that’s the other way around, everybody else is human and I’m the alien from a foreign land.

To be sure there were lessons I learned growing up among a trailer park community of young GIs, the disabled, the elderly, the divorced, the abandoned, and the widowed that I would have missed had I been shipped off to that boarding school in Virginia that Mama kept threatening to send me to.

It took my mother years of hard work and little sleep before she was able to move us out of that 12 by 60 into a house made of brick and mortar. A house with a concrete foundation, instead of one jacked up on cinder blocks.

In her own way, I suppose, my mother was a lot like Mitt Romney’s father — after a few years of assistance from the government, she was able to make her own way in the world, albeit her way was a lot less profitable than the elder Romney.

Don’t worry. This isn’t a political post. I don’t care who you vote for in this election, as long as you vote.

The truth of the matter is that the problem with this country isn’t the fault of those in leadership, although, the ineptitude of Congress and the Supreme Court ought to give us all pause. But even they are only a symptom, not the cause for the sheer shallowness of the masses.

If I had known that there was money to be made in televising one’s ignorance, I might not have worked to climb out of the crab pot. But back when I was growing up it was considered uncouth to act trashy in public. Shoot back then you didn’t even dare to act trashy in private for fear God would run and hide from you.

Ignorance was something to be avoided, not exploited. 

But that was back before cable television ruined this country.

Back before anyone ever heard of Honey Boo Boo and Go-Go Juice.

The Huffington Post has reported that Honey Boo Boo and her parents want more money for their disturbingly popular TLC show. Please allow me to point out that TLC may be about the most absurd use of an acronym ever — The Learning Channel??? Pleeeassee.

Dear God, have mercy and forgive us for our inexplicable stupidity.

The show is drawing over 3 million viewers.

One Huffington Post reader commented that had they known that all it took to be rich and famous was to be fat and stupid they wouldn’t have never gone to college. It is a crude remark but entirely apt given the nature of our culture right now.

Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter says that TLC is the most socially irresponsible channel on television. I don’t know if that’s true, given those Call a Playmate 1-800 advertisements that run during CNN’s Piers Morgan Show, but certainly TLC is giving CNN a run for its money.

But here’s the gosh-awful truth of it all — neither TLC or CNN would indulge in such debauchery if it weren’t for the millions of viewers taking to it like pigs to slop.

Like Congress and the Supreme Court, Honey Boo Boo and Mama June are only symptoms of the larger problem.

The real problem is those 3 million plus viewers/voters.

I wish the Pew Research Center or The Barna Group would tackle the question of when exactly did America become the White Trash Nation? And what, pray tell, do we do to stop the stampede of the masses headed straight for the slop house?