It’s happening. Honey Boo Boo’s show happened last night and she’s officially holding America hostage like Bane held Gotham hostage with his crazy mechanized Bond voice and a super huge bomb that kind of looked like Krane’s Technodrome.
Ok so maybe not really. But before everyone turns this into a referendum on our culture and the evils of Chick-Fil-A, let’s just breakdown the two reactions we should have to HBBC.
1. EITHER, you can get really, really mad that TLC is televising a show that is encouraging someone like HBBC to exist in reality. That’s totally your right and you can talk about how things were better when TV was socially conscious and it showed Desi and Lucy sleeping in separate beds and not some 5 year-old pseudo-anthropomorphizing her ample belly. I can’t really argue with you there.
But this is reality. As a culture, we’ve become desensitized to general stupidity so we need full throttle stupidity. We need to go rural Georgia and find a family who speaks such an evolved dialectic of English slang that we have to subtitle them. SUBTITLES. It was like watching The Passion of The Christ except for everything but the subtitle similarity.
But this is where we are. This isn’t an outlier. I mean did you see the show that was teased during HBBC about conjoined twins? DID YOU SEE IT? It’s basically a girl with her twins head on her shoulder or as most everyone else silently refers to it, NIGHTMARE FUEL.
But the point is, this is our culture now. So if you lament this, get ready because you’re going to be doing a lot of lamenting and don’t lament the player, lament the game. Which leads me to the other possibility…
2. OR, you could understand that, in a sense, this was HBBC’s manifest destiny. While you could argue that the girls on Teen Mom have inadvertently ventured down a rabbit hole that started with them getting pregnant like thousands of other teenagers and their situation now has been foisted on them by MTV and superlative ratings, HBBC was going to be this way regardless of whether or not you watched her. Whether 5 million people watch her squish her stomach together and personify it or 5 people see it, she was still going to do it, my friend.
She’s a lot like Snooki or The Situation from Jersey Shore in this way. Some people are changed through the trappings of fame (to reuse previously mentioned allusions: Teen Mom girls, J-Woww, Vinny, Pauly D, etc) and some were engineered for it and come alive within it like Megatron after being unthawed from the ice of the Article Circle (HBBC, Snooki, and The Situation).
You can’t weep for HBBC as a human for the injustice done to her by being prostituted out as an entertainment source because this was already happening. This was already her life. She’s not just now eating out of an obnoxiously large jar of cheeseballs for breakfast, nor did her sisters just now get the nicknames of Chubbs, Pumpkin, and Jerkyface1Now she’s just getting paid, so I mean, good for her.
What was it the Joker said?
And NO ONE is better at squishing her belly together and talking from it. NO ONE.
- I made that one up but you get the gist. [↩]
I had to scroll down far enough to read your post so that I could get that GIF out of my field of vision. So…thanks for that.
"We are like the dumbest nation on the whole planet. I think it has something to do with freedom. We're very free, so we're very free to be stupid." -Marshall from The United States of Tara, a show that was really good but that got canceled because America doesn't like good TV– it likes HBBC.
My biggest fear about this show: it being shown in other countries, thus verifying what they all ready think about us.
Deuces!
I just saw on TLC that Honey Boo Boo ringtones are available for purchase. "A dolla makes me holla."