The other day I was sitting at the bar of a decent restaurant having dinner. There was a TV to the right and to the left above the bar. The one to the left was airing some previously recorded UFC fights, so every few minutes I was treated to the site of a guy bashing another guy’s bloody face with his elbow, which due to our evolutionary programming for self-preservation, is actually really hard to ignore. At one point I looked down at the tar tar I was eating and remarked that it kind of resembled one of the 90% naked guys’ head wounds.
The other TV was showing a countdown of Fails which predominantly featured people falling off of, or crashing, various motor-sport vehicles. One video in particular got me to thinking – it showed a guy on a motorcycle driving up one of those fake Vegas-style waterfalls. As the guy hopped up the rocks, a good twenty feet in the air, he lost control of his bike and bailed headfirst, falling not only the twenty feet he’d already ascended, but several feet further down into a recess, at which point he landed on his head, the bike fell on him, some douchebag host made a stupid face, and the show moved on to document other people potentially fatally injuring themselves.
Isn’t this kind of weird? Of the several shows devoted more or less to airing footage of injuries – Tosh.O, Rob Dyrdek’s Ridiculousness, America’s Funniest Videos, and a bunch of others, is it possible at least one of the subjects of these videos is dead as a result of their accident?
After some minimal research, as far as I can tell there aren’t any releases or set of stipulations one needs to agree to when submitting a video. Meaning, again as far as I can tell, if someone were to get hit in the nuts with a baseball and immediately fall to the pavement, split their head open and bleed out, there wouldn’t be any issue on the part of the networks with airing the video, whether it captured the bleeding out or not. After all, they’re apparently into showing people suffocating from sarin gas, although this isn’t supposed to be hilarious.
Given that there are thousands of these videos permeating Youtube and television airwaves on a daily basis, I’d put the odds of someone having not survived their accident at nearly a hundred.
So, what does this mean? How did we get to the point that my dinner must prominently feature hand-to-hand combat and guys smashing their balls into handrails? If I wanted to live in Germany I’d buy a ticket.
Clearly part of this is desensitization, or just general disillusion. It really feels like Rome is crumbling.
Whatever the case, it has reached ridiculous heights, to the point that I can’t eat some tempura without wondering if I’m being entertained by a family tragedy.
I will explore the reasons our society is increasingly identifying with loser frat initiations and ant-burning culture in Part II.