November 22, 2004
Fight, Fight, Fight! Literate fans
Fight, Fight, Fight!
Literate fans of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” may have noticed two particularly revealing recent news items. (And no, we aren’t discussing the brouhahas regarding The Spectator; we’re using “revealing” in another sense of the word. So keep your trousers up, Boris.) First, at an awards ceremony presided over by something called Vibe magazine, a melee broke out, in which one man was stabbed. Second, at a basketball game between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons, a full-scale brawl occurred, in which a number of players took part.Now we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are not big fans of “rap music,” and we don’t hale from Detroit. Even so, we believe that we have gleaned something about contemporary American society that is—if we must say so ourselves—intriguing.
It appears as if the American public is just itching for some fisticuffs. To our friends on the Left, this is no doubt related to the brutal misadventure in Iraq, which was undertaken to enrich a cabal of evil neoconservative blah, blah, blah.
We aren’t so sure that’s true. But we do know that citizens and illegal aliens of these here United States of America are dying (literally and figuratively) to take in some scuffles.
And, no, we aren’t implying that this sets the stage for renewed interest in boxing, karate, wrestling, or violent videogames. Rather, visionaries that we are, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” think we have landed on just the thing to captivate the American public and take in billions of dollars.
Our idea? How nice of you to ask. We call it “Beating the Tar Out of the Stars,” and we think it could make us squillionaires.
“Beating the Tar Out of the Stars,” broadcast, naturally enough, on the Fox Television Network, pits a group of ten ordinary Joes battling it out with ten A-List celebrities. Ten construction workers, say, could take on ten professional baseball players. Ten lawyers, say, could take on two boy bands. You get the picture.
Think, dear reader, of the entertainment value this would offer the greater American public. Most celebrities would brandish noses more broken than Geraldo’s. Average working folk could glory in pummeling Madeline Albright. And ten members of British Petroleum’s executive board could thrash Sean Penn, proving that some people actually consider “blood for oil” a reasonable transaction.
We know what you are thinking, dear reader: Television networks, in all their moral earnestness, have already offered the public various grudge matches between C-List celebrities such as Vanilla Ice and Tanya Harding.
But that stuff’s all child’s play. No one cares about Vanilla Ice getting pummeled; most of his career has been one long drubbing. But when Jack Nicholson is missing some teeth, the whole world will smile.
