The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Honey Boo Boo

Depending upon your religious beliefs, the signs of the impending Apocalypse are varied. Some say there are seven signs, and some say ten. There’s also those wonderful harbingers of the Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen; War , Famine, Death, and Pestilence. I’m pretty sure we can now add a Fifth dread rider, and another sign of the Apocalypse: Honey Boo Boo.

I try my best to not watch “reality” television, because, by & large, there’s very little reality involved. Peoples’ real lives are generally too mundane to draw an audience every week, which brings advertising dollars. Thusly, creativity is used by producers and writers to contrive situations guaranteed to draw viewers who are generally just ignorant enough to believe it’s real. Or, like countless others, you watch to see how screwed up other peoples’ lives are and then feel much better about your own life, because they are infinitely more screwed up than you are.

Thus enter the Fifth Rider.

Lo, behold, a Pink Horse, and the name of the Rider was Honey Boo Boo Child.

We can thank the TLC cable network for this train wreck. Ostensibly, TLC stands for The Learning Channel, but lately has become colloquially known as The Freakshow Channel. Sure, we’re learning a few things from their shows on occasion, but by & large their versions of reality are just more & more bizarrely fringe and exploitively sensational.

This was the channel that brought us “19 Kids & Counting”, about the Duggar Family and a mother who treats her uterus as a clown car. They brought is “Sister Wives”, turning fundamentalist Mormon polygamy into mainstream talk show chic. They gave us a trio of tattoo shows in Miami, LA, and NYC, because one can never see too many dramatic tattoo shows. They brought us “Jon & Kate Make 8” and we all watched their marriage crumble after she became a total bitch & he became a walking ad for Ed Hardy gear. Now, in addition to bringing us shows about Amish kids who flee to the real world and endless shows about wedding dresses, they also give us “Abby & Brittany” a show about conjoined twins going to college. Two heads, one body, all the fun in the world.

Nope, not PhotoShopped...and they come across as really well-adjusted, sweet girls.

And then there’s Honey Boo Boo. Lord help us all. This kid, a seven year old named Alana Thompson, is one of those poor unfortunates who are Pageant Kids. I say unfortunate because I think that 99% of the kids who do this are forced into it by parents in some sort of bizarre Munchhausen deal; they weren’t pretty/thin/talented enough to have been in an adult pageant so they shove their kids onstage dressed like mini-hookers to make themselves feel validation.

Paint the kid up like a prosti-tot and she looks a bit like a chubby JonBenet Ramsey, and we all remember how well THAT turned out in the end, don't we?

HBB was the breakout sensation from the show “Toddlers & Tiaras”, and now has her own show of nonsensical dimwittery that seemingly only serves to reinforce a negative stereotype of what people outside the South think of those of us who actually do live in the South. And believe me, as someone who isn't a native Southerner and moved here by choice, I am well aware of what folks think of us down here.

Much was made of the fact that this show garnered a bigger TV audience than the Republican National Convention. The show is rapidly becoming a cottage industry of t-shirts, ringtones, and who knows what else. America loves a good train wreck, and this one is guaranteed to last into a second season before our fickle and deficient attention spans drift toward the next flavor of the day.

Believe it or not there is actually a wide gene pool in this picture.

The show follows Alana and her nicknamed family in their little village of McIntyre, Georgia.. Her mom, June Shannon, is a 33-year old big bundle of, well, June. A bit over 300 pounds, June had all four of her kids, seemingly all by different fathers, before she was 25. She’s shacked up with (but not married to) Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson. He’s 40 and looks 60, with a never-ending supply of chewing tobacco stuffed in his mouth and the ever-present spit bottle in hand. The other three kids are Lauryn, 12, who gets called Pumpkin; Jessica, 15, called Chubbs; and just-turned-18 Anna, known as Chickadee. Incidentally, June is also a grandmother, as Chickadee had a baby of her own in July. Yup, a grandparent at 33. The kids do call June Mama, but always refer to Mike as Sugar, Sugar Bear, or Shugy. The man is never called Mike, or Dad. He is simply a nickname.

Note: Seemingly no info is forthcoming on Lauryn’s father. Some say June’s not even sure who he is. Anna’s father has been in and out of jail, and Jessica’s father did time for sexual exploitation of a child via the Internet making him a registered sex offender. Even Sugar Bear has a record. I sense a theme here. Mom’s been stuck more times than a pincushion & has a penchant for scofflaws. Of course, she has a record, too.

June's mug shot from a few years back....

Taking a cue from History Channel’s hit show “Swamp People”, every episode is subtitled so that people from outside the region can actually follow what’s being said. It's not just the family, either; the employees at the convenience store next to the house are captioned too. After watching a couple seasons, I seldom need the subtitles to follow the Cajun accents on "Swamp People" but I find I actually need the subtitles to make semblance of the mush uttered from the mouths of this family. This is a bit surprising because the town where these folks live is only about 4 hours west of me near Macon, Georgia. These could be the thickest southern accents I have ever encountered, and I live here.

Side Note: They keep referring to the upcoming birth of Chickadee’s baby Kaitlyn as coming out of her
"biscuit" or "moon pie". Can’t say I have ever heard of a vagina referred to as either. Look for Biscuit to become the new Vajayjay for 2012.

Of course, since just being everyday rednecks would lose its shine after a couple episodes, there’s contrived adventures and plots to follow. In an effort to have a gimmick sidekick for HBB at her pageants, the child is given a baby potbelly pig named Glitzy... Seriously. Not a kitten, not a puppy, not a goldfish….a redneck kid gets a tiny pig that screams incessantly when picked up and then craps on the kitchen table.

They send the family to The Redneck Games, a celebration of White Trash Culture and Inbreeding. They send the women folk to get pedicures & spa treatments….bear in mind the condition of the feet on people who generally wander barefoot. The people at the spa were somewhere between disgusted & amused, like most members of polite society they encounter (who need no subtitles). One episode had the family go trash-picking at the town dump (which they called The Department Store), and another highlighted a friend of theirs doing exceedingly dangerous things on his four-wheeler on their way to go mud-bogging. On their anniversary, Sugar & June go out to eat & June is presented with a deer statue (that she could have cared less about) that represented the family’s fondness for eating roadkill deer. 

For entertainment the family will gather as a unit and play “Guess the Breath”, by where one member is blindfolded and forced to guess who just blew their noxious breath into their face. Bear in mind, none of them seems fond of brushing their teeth ever, let alone regularly, and that one of them has a constant wad of chew in his gobbet.

Their idea of “sketty” (Really? Seriously? Is spaghetti that hard to say? Oh, wait; we had to dumb it down to make the show even worse) is to boil noodles, throw several at the wall to test for al dente doneness, add burger, and then make a vile sauce of butter and ketchup rather than opting for Ragu. 

At least one member of the family is flatulent at all times.Seems to be a rule. It seems to be a point of pride. And they are a LOUD family. They shout constantly throughout the house to summon family members rather than just going to get someone in the next room. HBB herself always seems to be shouting in her clips, usually some trademark soundbyte phrase like “You better redneck-ognize!”.

Of course, most of the action surrounds the child, who usually passes as a sweet kid being being used as a meal ticket by her family, and at others she comes across as a bit of an obnoxious center-of-attention-type, spouting mildly inappropriate things like “A dolla makes me holla”, and “I want some mon-ayyyyy”. Maybe because the kid is often hopped up on GoGoJuice, a home made blend of Mountain Dew and Red Bull, given to her to get her hopped up before pageants.

The Apocalypse is Nigh...

Opinion-wise, I’m torn. Part of me says this is a family being exploited for their hick naivete, and part says no one is that white trash and this is all contrived, with them being part & parcel to the hoodwinking of the viewing public. I’m thinking they might just be clever white trash who found a meal ticket and are using it to ride the gravy train till it derails. Rumor has it that the reason June won’t marry Sugar is that if she married him the child support from the other BabyDaddies will stop. Gotta get paid, y’know. Sources say they got between $20,000 and $40,000 to do the first season of ten shows, and now they want $10,000 per episode for season two. And they'll get it, too. I bet this show will draw more viewers than Idol this year.

BREAKING NEWS: Sugar Bear was in an ATV accident whilst mud bogging and his leg wound was so infected it was almost amputated. Today we learned he will not lose the leg. And in further developments, we have learned that the grandchild, Anna/Chickadee’s daughter Kaitlyn, was born with an extra thumb on one hand. Seriously. I wouldn't make this up.

I want my eMpTyVee

I’m beating a dead horse here, I’m sure, but what happened to “Music Television”? Part of me wonders why artists even bother to make videos for their singles anymore( unless it’s to sell on DVD compilations) when the chances of the clip seeing serious airplay rotation are about the same as seeing Rosie O’Donnell in a thong doing a believable love scene with George Clooney.

As a teenager, I thought that music videos were a brilliant concept. In early 1984, in my freshman year, there were after-school video shows, and on the USA Network there were shows like Friday Night Videos and the Saturday night Nightflight all-video show. These were in addition to the fledgling MTV, which was barely 3 years old at the time and still played vids all day & night. For a not-quite-15 year old music fanatic like me, this was simply the coolest shit, indeed.

There was even an MTV for “old” people over 30 starting in 1985 called VH-1, also playing videos 24/7.

Life was good. Then something went HORRIBLY wrong.

Sometime in 1987 or so, MTV’s focus shifted, and Music Television started to become Miscellaneous Television by abandoning the all-video format and doing “shows”. Granted, not all of it was bad. Liquid Television gave exposure to avant-garde animators like Peter Chung, and for better or worse the American public was gifted with Beavis & Butthead and Ren & Stimpy. Then the 90’s saw the MTV Unplugged phenomenon, which was pretty cool for awhile. But for every novel concept there was a plethora of complete and utter GOBSHITE. Such drivel and dreck as Remote Control, The Grind, Made, Jackass, Road Rules, Next, Date My Mom, My Super Sweet Sixteen, and the worst offender of all, The Real World, which spawned the genre of reality TV. Bastards...

Even once-clever ideas like Cribs or Pimp My Ride have become trite, jaded mockeries of their original selves. Cribs was a chance to look inside the homes of celebrities and see how they lived. Now they struggle to find people to showcase, so now you get to see the third-string quarterback for the Houston Texans show off the obligatory fridge full of Cristal champagne and stating that the bedroom is “where awl da' magic happens” before showing off a bloated garage full of SUV’s and sports cars and a giant-screen TV home theater.

Pimp My Ride has gone from a really novel customization of broken-down cars for needy young adults to seeing just how much ridiculous and goofy-assed shit you can bolt onto a 400 dollar hooptie just for the sake of doing it.

VH-1 is no better. They play more videos than MTV by far, but after the obligatory 3-4 ours of music in the early morning, their litany of lame-assed shows starts up. Only they have fewer to choose from and thus repeat them ad nauseum, flogging the entire stable of dead horses in marathons of Celebrity Fat Camp, Surreal Life, the train wreckages of the Flavor of Love shows, Hoboken’s Next Top Model, and the I Love the 70/80/90’s shows. The “I Love…” shows are cute nostalgia the first time; after 25 viewings, not so much.

In 1996 MTV tried to get back to its music roots by launching M2 (later called MTV2), intended to show videos again, with a more eclectic and alternative mix, and now it’s all rap and rap-related shows when not playing repeats of other MTV shows. VH-1 finally launched VH-1 Classic to pander to old farts who remember videos, playing clips from the 70’s and 80’s, new clips from older artists, and occasionally dusting off the old alternative vids left in the vault from MTV’s “120 Minutes”, circa 1987.

There’s other choices out there if you dig around a bit. Fuse TV is a pseudo-music channel catering to the 17-year old text-messaging Emo crowd, but they’re a pale shadow of what they could be. I don’t get Much Music on my provider, so I miss out on Canada’s answer to MTV. Instead, I now watch a lot of IMF, the International Music Feed, which plays vids and interviews 24/7 from all over the world and from a lot of different genres. In the space of a typical hour you can see bands from Ireland, Italy, Ukraine, Finland, England, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, all singing in their native languages. I’ve been exposed to some cool stuff that I’d never see elsewhere, even if I don’t always understand the lyrics. But, good music and good songs are good no matter what the language.

So, if you’re like me and you miss the good old days of real videos and not some rehashed gobbledygook bullshit, take heart. It’s still out there but you gotta dig deeper to find the nuggets of gold. Or, do what the real die-hards do: search out stuff on You Tube. Crap quality streaming of an old Smiths video beats watching Hulk Hogan raise his kids any day.

SURVIVOR: COMPTON

I'm about done with Reality TV.

Reality, my ass. The REAL WORLD? Oh, please....a handpicked crew of extras from a Bennetton ad, living rent-free in a fucking penthouse full of Ikea furniture and going on exotic roadtrips & hosting huge parties, and getting just drunk enough to fuck their gorgeous castmates and start a blood fued with the Bad Boy character? Horseshit. You want the Real World? Put 4 starving, unattractive college kids together in a rat-hole tenement with milk-crate & cinder-block furniture, pulling together penny rolls to buy a six-pack of PapSmear Blue Ribbon Beer, and working crap jobs at a pizza place to pay the rent. That's the real real world. In the real world, you have bills & shitty jobs and at least one doofy room mate who sits around in his undies playing Warcraft or some crap on the Playstation.

Survivor? More bullshit. They act like everyone is starving & eaten alive by leeches, but I guarantee you, someone is slipping the camera guy a knobjob for a Snickers and a Pepsi. You want Survivor? Drop these clowns off naked on an island with nothing but a sharpened stick and some string for 30 days. Whoever is still alive at the end is the survivor. Or better yet, drop them off covered in 50 dollar bills and wearing a white hood in Compton. Whoever makes it to Hollywood is the winner.

And Fear Factor? Oh please...more like Nasty Factor. A show that has the formula of: Pretty people do a stunt with 250 percent more protection than a stuntman gets, then eat something so fucking nasty that even Joseph Mengele and Jeffrey Dahmer would cringe, and then do another stunt. I could see if things were always based around real, rational fears, like spiders, snakes, rats, lawyers, and heights, but who wakes up in the morning with a phobic, irrational fear of eating a pig's uterus? OH, NO! I hope I don't get forced to eat a horse's asshole today!!!! I may not get out of bed!!! The earthworm and congealed blood pizzas might find me!

How about Peer Factor? Where your friends egg you on to do dumber & dumber shit? Or Beer Factor, where you get so drunk you'll do anything? First one to pass out & shit their pants without dying of alcohol poisoning is the winner. Or Queer Factor? Where 5 totally homophobic contestants have to do progressively gayer & gayer things until they find themselves naked in a hot tub with Carson Kressley and Steven Cojocaru?