I Figured Out What Wrong with America…
We’re becoming a bunch of fucking pussies.
Sorry, but there it is.
What has caused me to draw this conclusion? I just got cable.
Now, I have never had cable in my adult life, which means my TV watching experience has been much more limited than others. So after it was installed today I figured, “Hey, lets see what the rest of the world is so enraptured by.”
So being an animal person, while channel flipping I stop at Spike TV’s “When Good Pets Go Bad”. Oh. M. Gawd. What a sensationalist, paranoiac piece of crap.
O.K. Usual spate of dog attack stories to make you terrified of your neighbors boxer and the odd “pet snake gets loose and swallows a Chihuahua.” But then they get desperate. “BE AFRAID!!!” They start going into wild animal attacks. A moose that a school attempted to keep as a mascot. Shamu getting frisky and pushing a swimmer around. Guy who wrestles alligators gets his comeuppance. Got news for you guys over at Spike, those have never been, nor will they be (without thousands of years of genetic manipulation), pets. Those are wild animals, never meant to be pets. You deal with wild animals, you takes your chances.
Then there was a police dog attacking a perp. Oh yeah, that's a "Pet" gone "Bad". As anyone will tell you working dogs are not pets.
The one that snapped the straw on my camel's back was the footage of a team of Clydesdales getting loose at a parade. Yeah, four horses each weighing as much as a car running at a crowd is scary, but my Gawd do they play this up. First of all, they start running from 400 yards out from where they broke through the line. They went for the place the crowd was thinnest and by the time the got there was only one guy that must have froze or something, because everyone had cleared out. Mom’s had time to grab their children from strollers and clear out. But this guy was slow and he got knocked to the ground, but he was still moving and conscious. Know why? As Gandhi can tell you, horses don’t step on things on the ground. They are afraid of them. That’s why they hate snakes and mice and little things. Horses have to be specifically trained to trample people as warhorses were in the Middle Ages. These clydesdales were just trying to get away, nothing more. It not like they stuck around. They jumped a bunch of lawn chairs and were trying to be gone.
“See this woman and her child trapped by the rampaging animals!” The footage shows her at least 10 feet away from them as the horses ran by. “See this brave man runing straight into their path!” Actually, he was running up behind them after the horses had stopped (the two rear horses slipped and fell bringing the team to a halt). Jeezus!
Spike TV, the “Man’s Show" x24, and this is what they run? Is this what American men are becoming? Paranoid of every little thing: “It has the capability to hurt me! Kill it! Kill it NOW!” What's next, guys from the WWF show us you to make blanket forts?
I come from a logging family and am fond of draft horses (thoroughbreds always look as if they would snap into kindling if they actually did any real work). I actually enjoy going to horse pulls if I happen to be at a country fair and I love checking out the stables. I’m not expert on horses by any means, but I enjoy them. One fair I was at in Maine, one guy had this beautiful set of matched Horse-zillas. Bays, 20 hands high if they were an inch. Beautiful, picture book team. They looked like the team to beat, but once they got out in the ring this young redneck trainer of theirs was screaming and whipping and pushing and all manner of unseemliness to get a “meh” performance out of them. Not bad, but certainly not what those animals were capable of.
Next guy, older gent, comes up. Totally mismatched team. One of them: a dark 17-18 hander and them other was a chestnut, little thing compared to other horses in the ring, size of a regular horse, but heavy. The trainer stands 8 feet back from the team, reigns in his hands and chirrups. That’s it. *WHAM* 4000 lbs. of horseflesh slammed into that harness in perfect synchronicity. Perfectly coordinated starting and stopping and when he gave them a rest, they stayed on their toes. They were waiting, they were ready to go.
I don’t need to tell you who won the contest…but I will lay odds that young buck probably didn’t go home and think, “Gee, maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong.” He probably went home, blamed his horses to everyone that would listen and probably traded them for another pair because it couldn’t possibly be his training methods.
The problem with most animals is people. Either we raise them wrong or we push them too far or we’re in their space. Animals are hardwired. They have to a hell of lot more adjusting to us than we do to them with a lot less brainpower to do it with (though there are some people that would make one question that observation). Yes, Nature is a dangerous place. The world is a dangerous place. You know about ten times more people die from the flu in the U.S. every year than died on 9-11? More people get hit by lightening yearly than killed in dog attacks? As one article I put up long ago observed about shark attacks, “Its an ocean, not a swimming pool.” You know what? Its nature, not your backyard. These are animals, not toys. Our ancestors had to deal with it and them on daily basis, far more than we ever do, and you didn’t hear them whipping the public into a frenzy, inciting paranoia about the “Dangerous Creatures Among Us!”. Life’s tough, get a helmet you big pansies. Or stay in your perfectly manicured backyards forever. Better yet, hide in the closet forever with a baseball bat, then nothing can happen to you. If you decide to come out with the rest of us a good rule with animals is respect them and their space and they will usually respect you and yours.
That show was the most obvious example of what I saw, but it seems to me that popular media is intent on making America scared. Gawd, it’s no wonder some of the outrageous attitudes I encounter, the twisted combination of violent machismo and “Aiiiigh everyone/everything is out to kill us, we’re all gonna die!” that the Bush administration has been able to exploit so well. Now I understand where it comes from: They’ve spent their life watching TV which tells them to be afraid of everything.
Folks, turn it off. Just turn it off, go read a book, go outside, call a friends, hop on the computer, just stop watching the damn thing. Read a newspaper rather than watching to news. Yeah, have shows you watch. I’m got cable to watch NASCAR and the Daily Show. I’m still going to watch NASCAR and the Daily Show, but if those shows aren’t on, I’m going to turn it off. Watch you shows you like, and then turn the damn thing off because they are only out to make money and as Wes Craven can assure you, fear sells big bucks.
Sorry, but there it is.
What has caused me to draw this conclusion? I just got cable.
Now, I have never had cable in my adult life, which means my TV watching experience has been much more limited than others. So after it was installed today I figured, “Hey, lets see what the rest of the world is so enraptured by.”
So being an animal person, while channel flipping I stop at Spike TV’s “When Good Pets Go Bad”. Oh. M. Gawd. What a sensationalist, paranoiac piece of crap.
O.K. Usual spate of dog attack stories to make you terrified of your neighbors boxer and the odd “pet snake gets loose and swallows a Chihuahua.” But then they get desperate. “BE AFRAID!!!” They start going into wild animal attacks. A moose that a school attempted to keep as a mascot. Shamu getting frisky and pushing a swimmer around. Guy who wrestles alligators gets his comeuppance. Got news for you guys over at Spike, those have never been, nor will they be (without thousands of years of genetic manipulation), pets. Those are wild animals, never meant to be pets. You deal with wild animals, you takes your chances.
Then there was a police dog attacking a perp. Oh yeah, that's a "Pet" gone "Bad". As anyone will tell you working dogs are not pets.
The one that snapped the straw on my camel's back was the footage of a team of Clydesdales getting loose at a parade. Yeah, four horses each weighing as much as a car running at a crowd is scary, but my Gawd do they play this up. First of all, they start running from 400 yards out from where they broke through the line. They went for the place the crowd was thinnest and by the time the got there was only one guy that must have froze or something, because everyone had cleared out. Mom’s had time to grab their children from strollers and clear out. But this guy was slow and he got knocked to the ground, but he was still moving and conscious. Know why? As Gandhi can tell you, horses don’t step on things on the ground. They are afraid of them. That’s why they hate snakes and mice and little things. Horses have to be specifically trained to trample people as warhorses were in the Middle Ages. These clydesdales were just trying to get away, nothing more. It not like they stuck around. They jumped a bunch of lawn chairs and were trying to be gone.
“See this woman and her child trapped by the rampaging animals!” The footage shows her at least 10 feet away from them as the horses ran by. “See this brave man runing straight into their path!” Actually, he was running up behind them after the horses had stopped (the two rear horses slipped and fell bringing the team to a halt). Jeezus!
Spike TV, the “Man’s Show" x24, and this is what they run? Is this what American men are becoming? Paranoid of every little thing: “It has the capability to hurt me! Kill it! Kill it NOW!” What's next, guys from the WWF show us you to make blanket forts?
I come from a logging family and am fond of draft horses (thoroughbreds always look as if they would snap into kindling if they actually did any real work). I actually enjoy going to horse pulls if I happen to be at a country fair and I love checking out the stables. I’m not expert on horses by any means, but I enjoy them. One fair I was at in Maine, one guy had this beautiful set of matched Horse-zillas. Bays, 20 hands high if they were an inch. Beautiful, picture book team. They looked like the team to beat, but once they got out in the ring this young redneck trainer of theirs was screaming and whipping and pushing and all manner of unseemliness to get a “meh” performance out of them. Not bad, but certainly not what those animals were capable of.
Next guy, older gent, comes up. Totally mismatched team. One of them: a dark 17-18 hander and them other was a chestnut, little thing compared to other horses in the ring, size of a regular horse, but heavy. The trainer stands 8 feet back from the team, reigns in his hands and chirrups. That’s it. *WHAM* 4000 lbs. of horseflesh slammed into that harness in perfect synchronicity. Perfectly coordinated starting and stopping and when he gave them a rest, they stayed on their toes. They were waiting, they were ready to go.
I don’t need to tell you who won the contest…but I will lay odds that young buck probably didn’t go home and think, “Gee, maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong.” He probably went home, blamed his horses to everyone that would listen and probably traded them for another pair because it couldn’t possibly be his training methods.
The problem with most animals is people. Either we raise them wrong or we push them too far or we’re in their space. Animals are hardwired. They have to a hell of lot more adjusting to us than we do to them with a lot less brainpower to do it with (though there are some people that would make one question that observation). Yes, Nature is a dangerous place. The world is a dangerous place. You know about ten times more people die from the flu in the U.S. every year than died on 9-11? More people get hit by lightening yearly than killed in dog attacks? As one article I put up long ago observed about shark attacks, “Its an ocean, not a swimming pool.” You know what? Its nature, not your backyard. These are animals, not toys. Our ancestors had to deal with it and them on daily basis, far more than we ever do, and you didn’t hear them whipping the public into a frenzy, inciting paranoia about the “Dangerous Creatures Among Us!”. Life’s tough, get a helmet you big pansies. Or stay in your perfectly manicured backyards forever. Better yet, hide in the closet forever with a baseball bat, then nothing can happen to you. If you decide to come out with the rest of us a good rule with animals is respect them and their space and they will usually respect you and yours.
That show was the most obvious example of what I saw, but it seems to me that popular media is intent on making America scared. Gawd, it’s no wonder some of the outrageous attitudes I encounter, the twisted combination of violent machismo and “Aiiiigh everyone/everything is out to kill us, we’re all gonna die!” that the Bush administration has been able to exploit so well. Now I understand where it comes from: They’ve spent their life watching TV which tells them to be afraid of everything.
Folks, turn it off. Just turn it off, go read a book, go outside, call a friends, hop on the computer, just stop watching the damn thing. Read a newspaper rather than watching to news. Yeah, have shows you watch. I’m got cable to watch NASCAR and the Daily Show. I’m still going to watch NASCAR and the Daily Show, but if those shows aren’t on, I’m going to turn it off. Watch you shows you like, and then turn the damn thing off because they are only out to make money and as Wes Craven can assure you, fear sells big bucks.
posted by KiplingKat | 9:14 PM
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