Hooray for Overt Cruelty!

Originally published October, 2006

Reality TV shows are everywhere today. I personally never really watched any until I discovered one so wonderfully sadistic, I simply had to watch. The show is called “Solitary”. Basically they take a bunch of people and put each of them in a room about the size of a jail cell and leave them alone. They have cameras so you can watch them slowly lose their sanity. It’s the only show based on the movie “Papillion”! Wait, it gets better. The contestants are also subjected to various forms of torture. A computer program named “Val”, who acts as the host, employs the torture. She speaks to the contestant through a television in the room. If you are the first one to give up on the torture you are eliminated. The forms of torture I saw included starvation, making contestants eat until they throw up, sleep deprivation, and lying on a bed of nails. It’s Guantanamo bay the game!

Personally, I thought the Japanese had surpassed in the cruelty of their game shows. In their shows they let komodo dragons attack people and put bottle rockets in their anuses. But we’ve surpassed even that. Our shows now not only break people’s bones, they break their spirits too! This even surpasses “Temptation Island” which shattered people’s relationships.

So now where can we go from here? What frontiers of game show sadism can be conquered? What other ways can human dignity be shattered? Well for starters we need to go farther than the ambiguous tortures we are using now. According to George W. Bush, these game shows are not actually torturing people. It would only be torture if someone directly caused physical harm to the contestant. The things used now are mostly mental torture, or some form of indirect physical harm. Also, the contestants agree to appear in these events, which automatically make a show lose its torture status. So I am proposing a new idea for a show. I will call it “Beat Down”. This show will take people and put them in a Russian gulag style prison. From there they will endure savage beatings, long periods of isolation, long periods of starvation, and performances by Barbara Streisand. If you kill yourself, you’re eliminated. The last person to survive wins a cash prize that they will undoubtedly spend on mental care. I am confident that this show will be the paragon of cruelty. Only the most cruel and depraved individuals would want this show to air. Fortunately, TV producers are just those types of people. I am confident the Fox network will not hesitate to pay me millions for the rights to this. So the next time you see me I’ll probably be testifying before a senate sub-committee before I am sentenced to life imprisonment. Until then my loyal readers, stay happy and always know that I love you.