Double Flee A

How did Chuck Norris get his own show? I watched it and it sucks. As if to second the motion, the first commercial is for the "hoveround", a motorized wheelchair famous for old women sitting in wheelchairs at the edge of the grand canyon, saying "hoveround" in the most digitally decrepitized old lady voices ever rendered. Click here if you don't know what I'm talking about. It's pretty famous. "Life-alert" was next. That's the same product that to the delight of talentless stand-up comedians everywhere brought you "help, I've fallen and I can't get up". Old people everywhere whose children left them alone and out of reach of the remote control were treated to a commercial that showed an old person lying helpless on the floor. The voiceover said that they could be there for "hours, even days".

Days. You can really make up your own jokes about this stuff as well as I can. Commercialism takes all the work out of it for you because of the unfortunate transparency of the elderly's dilemma.

I'd like to see a really good website by old folks that was to this effect to counter these and countless other blights on our mediascape such as life insurance ads: "We can't move around well, we can't hear, our bodies and minds are failing and we are mostly useless except to sell things to, but we did build the world you live in. Pause for a moment your self-congratulation for being young and clever and sexy and treat us with the respect every human deserves. Think about that you are as much a pawn in the game of consumerism as we so evidently have become in the eyes of mass media outlets. You buy things because they get you laid, we buy things so that we aren't forgotten. It's a shitty way to live, and we don't sit around drooling all day not noticing." Man.

And if I needed one more reason to hate Chuck Norris, it's that his stupid fucking show, in which the cars that crash are totaled junkers brought in from the worst impound lot in California, in which his stunt double with the bad wig and "just for men gel, looks so natural no one can tell" beard performs the most workaday of slapstick stunts, which got its wardrobe and plots for free with a five-dollar rebate from the miami vice reject lot, it is that this show provides commercial breaks for the only thing more inconcievably reprehensible than the show itself: a set of shameless, frightening, exploitative commercials aimed at those among us that have been shoved thoughtlessly aside in favor of the new and bad.

posted by dale @ 9:44 PM