Please Stop Fighting

If you have watched cable or satellite TV in the last few years, then you have undoubtedly at least flipped past some show with people yelling at each other.

It really started with Morton Downey, Jr., I guess. One of the summers that I was working in a pizza place after high school, one of the other cooks was always talking about how he would watch this crazy show late at night after we would close up the pizza place. It was on Channel 26 out of Fresno, which was a sign of the show's anti-quality. (Channel 26 was/is the Fresno FOX affiliate and this was back when FOX was pretty scummy. Pre-Simpsons.) So I watched this Morton Downey, Jr., show a couple of times and it basically was a guy who would get a couple of guests on, always with a cigarette dangling in his fingers, and then they would fight and he would fight with them. It was pretty dumb.

Well, little did we know what would happen. First, Geraldo had a big fight on his set and his nose got broken and Newsweek had this outraged cover story about how awful the whole thing was. Then Sally Jesse Raphael had to get cheap to compete. Then came Jerry Springer and we all know about that (although it did spawn a brilliant song by Weird Al Yankovic based on the Bare Naked Ladies' "One Week.")

At some point, this virus of trashiness jumped over to supposedly more respectable things like CNN's Crossfire. Being a total political junkie in college, I used to watch that when I got home from the warehouse where I worked during the summer. I got pretty sick of it, though, because it basically turned into people yelling at each other about politics. Every day. Pat Buchanan would say, "I just can't believe that the Democrats don't want to improve the economy by cutting the capital gains tax. Whatever liberal guy they had then would say, "Well, I can't believe that how the Republicans want to concentrate all wealth in the top 1% of America. Buchanan: "God, you liberals never stop with that LBJ Great Society stuff. People need personal responsibility." Liberal: "You mean like how Herbert Hoover wanted to encourage personal responsibility?" Well, pretty much every political show on cable news now seems to feature people yelling at each other. This is no great insight of mine. Have you seen when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and told them to stop yelling because they were "hurting the country?" (He also told them he wouldn't "be their monkey." That was pretty cool.)

Sports shows have always featured people yelling at each other, but, hey, that was usually about something important like whether Shaq gets too many calls. (He does, damn it!) The absolute depth to which yelling culture has sunk, however, leapt out at me over Christmas.

Here I was, sitting in the little breakfast room at the Comfort Suites in Clovis. The hotel was pretty nice, but the breakfast room, well, I found it kind of wanting. No Equal for my cereal. The orange juice tasted funny. Only melons among the available fruit. (As an aside, I think that you can really tell the quality of a free hotel breakfast by the fruit. If all they have is cantaloupe and honeydew, you know it isn't going to be good. Step up to the pineapples and strawberries, people.) But they had ESPN on the little TV, so that was good (at least for we males).

But what they had on ESPN was this show First and 10 and what was happening on First and 10 was that two chuckleheads and the token attractive-female hosts were discussing their favorite sports movies. They get around to Caddyshack, of course, and one chucklehead declares something like:

"I think that is just about the best sports movie because it really makes fun of the stuff about golf that needs ridicule."

Then the other one says something like:

"You know, I really never liked Caddyschack very much. I mean, Bill Murray was really funny, but he basically had nothing to do with the rest of the movie, which wasn't great."

And there they went:

"Are you kidding me!?! Caddyshack is one of the funniest movies of all time!! I mean, Chevy Chase alone was hilarious!!"

"Please. All Chevy Chase did was act like he always did on Saturday Night Live! That had nothing to do with sports!"

"Give me a break. I mean, if you asked half of the American population, they would say that Caddyshack is hilarious! Look, even the dumb cameraman agrees with me!"

At which point, the token attractive-female host breaks in to say:

"Yeah, I think he's right. The crew does seem to agree with him about Caddyshack. Let's go to a commercial break, which will feature a Cialis ad, a beer ad and then a Bowflex ad." (OK, I made that last dependent clause up.)

At this point, I officially had reached my absolute fill of faux fighting culture. I know that there are a million cable and satellite channels and people need to get viewers to keep them all on, but, God, shut up with the fighting. On ESPN Classic, when they have one of their countdown shows (e.g., Best Plays (usually ending with Kirk Gibson's home run as #1, as it should be), Best Rose Bowls, Worst Chokes (Buckner, #1 of course -- God that's still horrible to watch)), they now have a little piece at the end where two ESPN Radio debate the list. And they fight, of course. Why, why, why?

All of this made-up fighting is just bad for us, I think. I think that contributes to people just refusing to listen to other people's points of view. Like Jon Stewart said, it's hurting the country. It encourages obnoxious people like Rick Santorum and Howard Dean. Shut up a minute. Have some nice chamomile tea or a beer, depending on your preference. Watch some Blue's Clues or Jeopardy. Just please stop fighting.