February 07, 2001
V. T. Ytilaer

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt that a major United States television station decided to broadcast a television series that mocked even the stupidest and most retarded of its citizens. I dreamt that they decided that people in this country were so idiotic that they would watch a television show that aimed to entertain the masses by elevating some of the worst and most morally corrupt of human attributes: infidelity, tastelessness, superficiality, mendacity, and insensitivity.

And then I dreamt that the show was wildly successful, because the American audience was a group of self-indulgent jackasses that had lost its ability to exhibit rational and analytical thought processes. Apparently [in my dream] Americans had become so engrossed in cultural nihilism that they found themselves perfectly satisfied when fed a steady diet of media propaganda, capitalist dogma, religious piety, and republican and democratic euphemisms.

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I can't remember the name of the show very clearly, but it was on from 9:00 to 10:00 on Wednesday evenings; I think it was called "Irrelevant Island" or something like that. The premise of the show was that three couples went to an island, where they agreed to be filmed, and then they were all split up and accosted by hookers of the opposite sex. It was sort of like a class trip to Times Square before Rudy Giuliani got into office.

The island on the show isn't Manhattan [you can tell by the distinct lack of street corners and their associated homeless detritus] but all the men and women look like the pretty people you might see at Asia de Cuba, Liquids, Life, or several other bars/clubs/restaurants that I won't plug because they didn't offer me financial compensation [I never said I wasn't a hypocritical philistine]. The difference between these television babes and studs, and those you get to see in real life on your way to work in Manhattan every morning, is that the beauties on the show were gullible enough to agree to air out their dirty laundry on public television, instead of in the middle of the Major Deegan [where all dirty laundry should be aired].

The weird part of the dream, the part I still don't understand, was the ability of the network to keep its viewers interested for a full sixty minutes; only in a dream, could a person sit through a full hour of such pointless, vapid, inane programming [or maybe they could if they were really drunk or drugged up, or if they had been conditioned over time into being obese, morally barren couch potatoes]. I have a theory that, in my dream, the reason the American public watched the show, was that they had been bombed by Iraq; and that the scud missiles contained not botulism, but ecstasy. It was either that, or it might have been the commercials which the network ran during the program. When I woke up from this dream, I made a list of the commercials, in the order they were aired, as I remembered them:

Movie: Hannibal
Greyhound Buses
Kentucky Fried Chicken
Monster.com
Miller Genuine Draft
Movie: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Yahoo!
Taco Bell
Vagisil
Anti-Drug Commercial
Movie: Sweet November
Arm & Hammer Deodorant
Movie: Monkey Bone
HotJobs.com
Verizon
Ford Motors
New York Sports Club
Movie: Chocolat
Taco Bell
Greyhound Buses
Verizon
Ford Motors
Philips
Yahoo!
Movie: The Mexican

What these commercials reveal, is that the target audience [in my dream] was a bunch of unemployed, mass transit traveling wanna-be car owners, who watch too many movies, drink too much beer as they wash down buckets of greasy chicken, who surf the internet all day looking for fast food and armpit deodorant, while trying to get advice from their friends on the phone about how to clear up their yeast infections.

That group of people would certainly have been kept intellectually aroused by such fascinating programming. When there are people like that in this world, we're really in trouble.

I'm glad it was just a dream.