Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Last year was a very rough year for me, financially, and it forced me to go without certain things most of us take for granted. One of them was a television. I had a TV set, but I couldn't afford cable, so I just used it to watch movies. Sometimes I missed being able to crash on the couch and watch the NFL on Sundays, or "Seinfeld" when I got home in the evening.

But it turns out being without a TV for a year was good for me. I didn't realize how good until I got cable again. It's not like I've fallen back into television addiction; on the contrary, I mainly just watch reruns of sitcoms I like, and "CSI" and two of the 800 versions of "Law & Order", and History Channel documentaries. What I am having a problem with is the commercials I see for shows on other channels. It's a constant reminder of how completely brain-dead our society is.

Last weekend I saw an ad for a new show on Fox called "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?" Oh my god. Are you kidding me?

Here's an excerpt from an article yesterday on www.reuters.com: The new Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?" delivered the highest series premiere on any network in viewership in nearly nine years, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by Nielsen Media Research.

Did the founding fathers of America have this in mind when they spilled their blood for our freedom? Hell no. If they saw the manure we occupy our time with today, they'd have handed England the deed to the United States on a silver platter with some wine and cheese. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we're all a bunch of pathetic, spoiled, flabby morons. We are. Sure, you can blame it on the executives who do the programming for the networks, but they wouldn't put this crap on if they knew we wouldn't watch it, if we didn't sit on our fat asses with bags of greasy chips and drool out of the sides of our mouths watching programming that appeals to the lowest common denominator of humanity. Hell, they invented a whole device, TiVo, to record the swill on television that we miss during the times we're pretending to lead productive lives. Then again, maybe I should get a TiVo, and that way I could fast forward through commercials for shows like this.

I'm not saying I'm better than anyone else. I was addicted to "Friends" and "American Idol" like everyone else was. The only way I got away from it was by being financially forced to not have a TV, and my point is that now I can clearly see today's TV programming for the insulting, mindless crap that it is. And I draw the line at a show about how we're all dumber than 5th graders. I'd never watch that, even for shits and giggles. It's too depressing. You know why? Because we're raising our 5th graders in a world where "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?" is the number one show in America.