The devolution will be televised as we go slouching towards Idiocracy

On Saturday night I watched a human cock fight. No, I didn't run across this event in some rural, piss-scented booze barn, it was broadcast live on national television by CBS, the same network that brought you Touched by an Angel and Murder She Wrote.

I'd just walked home from seeing a movie, Iron Man, thinking a lot about how it seems to me that our culture seems to be debasing at an even greater pace over the last year or two than it seemed to be debasing previously. What sparked these thoughts was a combination of failing to find enjoyment in a movie that so many had lauded so greatly, being almost overrun by the estrogen-infused Scary Sadshaws that had swooped down on the cineplex for the S.A.T.C. movie, along with being subjected to previews of movies featuring Adam Sandler, Jack Black, and Mike Myers that seemed to have been made specifically for capturing the disposable dollars of 15 year-old boys.

It must have been a quarter after 11 or so when I returned home and flipped on the TV. It was tuned to CBS from my watching something earlier in the day, and the main event of a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) prime time extravaganza was just about to start.

The main event of the main event, if you will, was a man named Kimbo Slice. I'd heard a lot about Mr. Slice over the last couple of years, namely about how he was a homeless man from the streets of Miami who scraped up cash every now and then by beating the crap out of people in underground Fight Club type street-fighting rings. Videos of Mr. Slice eviscerating his opponents found their way to the Youtubes, whereby Mr. Slice evolved into a sort of living urban legend. He was scooped up by the MMA braintrust and has since been relentlessly promoted as the next big thing in the "sport."



Kimbo Slice's opponent for the match was a Brit named James Thompson. Now, I'd never watched a MMA event prior to Saturday night, it's just not really my thing, and as the introductions of the two fighters were being made I contemplated changing the channel or putting some music on, but my morbid curiosity wouldn't let me. Try as I might to fend off the urge to watch due to a premonition that what I was about to see would at once repulse and fascinate me, for the life of me I could not look away.

One of the reasons for my premonition of grotesque brutality was the fact that Thompson, though obviously well-conditioned and quite ferocious looking, possessed a cauliflower ear the size of Rhode Island. One of the announcers doing the CBS broadcast described it at one point as resembling an "alien life form." Personally, it evoked an immediate image of the "conjoined fetus lady" from South Park.



Through the first two rounds of the fight Thompson more than held his own with Mr. Slice. In fact, there were moments when it appeared that Thompson, described by most accounts going in as a lamb being thrust into a lion's den, would take him down. But then, in the third and final round, the inevitable happened, and Mr. Slice's formidable right fist made solid contact with Thompson's deformed ear. Bloody mayhem ensued...



The more that I've thought about all this over the past day or so, the more I think that Thompson was put into the ring with Mr. Slice in prime time specifically because of his deformed left ear. It is my contention that whatever body governs MMA fights, along with CBS as its willing accomplice, wanted to showcase a bloodbath. And they got it.

At some point during my watching of this event, it struck me that the whole spectacle seemed eerily like a scene out of Idiocracy, Mike Judge's 2006 film about a modern man of average intellect who, through a government experiment gone awry, wakes up in an America 500 years into the future to find himself hailed as a genius in a nation full of, well, idiots. The America of the future in Idiocracy is ruled by an ex professional wrestler/porn star, sexual favors are menu items at Starbucks, and the world is facing a famine crisis due to the fact that an energy drink company, Brawndo, has conned humanity using ubiquitous marketing/advertising into thinking that water is for pussies, even to the point where it's being used to grow crops, which is, of course, the whole reason for the famine.

During my viewing of the fight, I doubt that there was a single camera angle in which the Rockstar energy drink name and/or logo wasn't clearly visible. Just saying. I'm sure that a medieval style no holds barred fight held inside of a steel cage sponsored by an energy drink manufacturer was merely a coincidence, a coincidence whose harsh reality washed over me like a cold shower on a sub-zero morning in a non-heated apartment.

Is the day of an Iowa farmer spraying his rows of corn with Rockstar really that far off? I consider Mike Judge to be a satirical genius and a bit of a hero, but the way we're going I think that he could have actually set Idiocracy five years into the future instead of 500.

Regardless, this much is crystal clear to me: A nation that derives entertainment from this sort of thing (You know it's fucked up when even Michael Jackson is appearing in public to take it all in) is a nation of fucking idiots. Pure and simple.