What’s the reality of your life, friends? If you’re like me, you enjoy a persecuted existence, eating Vienna sausages in a bunker-like home, trying to avoid the peering eye of government tyranny-- the winters are remarkably mild. I’m not complaining. I am happy, and happy to occasionally talk to all of you about the lurking evils that reside around every corner of our modern society.

My latest discovery is one that should be blatantly apparent to some of you who share my superior intelligence and suspicion, but for many of you, you are unaware and the victims of a government plot of malfeasance meant to subdue you into a stupor of complacency which allows our federal overlords to do whatever they please.

I am talking, of course, about the plague that is reality television in America. As you sit back and watch bumbling fat people bare their ample chests and step onto an oversized scale to see if they won a chance to sleep in king size bed for a night, or a flock of twenty-somethings running around some metropolis trying to find out how many beers it takes to get laid, the government is dumbing you down by forcing you to make a choice.

 Either you choose to watch this crap and think to yourself, “Well at least I’m better off than these poor bastards,” or you think, “Geeze, I wish I could get on a show like that.”

Whichever path you take, the government wins. With the first option, you become overly grateful for your particular circumstance and eventually feel that all is well, increasing your tolerance for government intrusion and abuse of power because as you constantly see on TV, “It could be worse.”

Option two means that you have become a moron, and easy pickin’s for any and all manner of government exploitation. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the next time you settle in with a bag of chips to watch some unrealistic reality programming, don’t. There’s a real Big Brother out there just waiting outside your door. I know it.

 - Roy Bancroft, Jr.