Latest bout with insanity comes to CBS
By Bryan Burwell
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Sunday, Jun. 01 2008
All around us, there’s evidence that we live in a world that increasingly confuses the bizarre for the entertaining, the outrageous for the significant.
With television as our voyeuristic guide, we keep getting larger doses of the twisted “realities” of over-the-hill rap stars, dysfunctional brides, celebrities in rehab, ostentatious suburban housewives and a wild menagerie of other mindless idiots who are willing to expose themselves to America as part of their 15 minutes of fame.
Welcome to the American Apocalypse, a dark and sad place that celebrates the absurd and the obscene, and can’t tell the difference between good ratings and good taste. Jumping headlong into this disturbing abyss comes the CBS television network, which Saturday broadcast the first of three prime-time events it calls “EliteXC Saturday Night Fights.”
It might as well have been called “Barroom Brawls After Dark,” or “Don’t Go Down That Alley 'Cause You Might Get Your Head Cracked,” because whatever this is, it sure isn’t in the same realm with boxing. This is boxing like the demolition derby is auto racing. It’s more closely associated with pro wrestling — with one notable exception: wrasslin’s fake. The mayhem that goes on in mixed martial arts is not.
The MMA apologists call that its appeal. I call that its fatal flaw. Mixed Martial Arts wants the world to sanction its underworld barbarism as legitimate. But no matter which form of this “sport” you look at, it ought to be hard to stomach for anyone with even the faintest grain of civility.
This crazed, unrestrained violence allows men with thinly padded leather on their fists to pummel each other nonstop, even when your opponent is on the ground. It allows you to knee your opponent in the groin, then while he’s prone on the ground, pound him in the head, choke him, or squeeze his torso with your legs locked around him, attempting to rupture kidneys and squeeze the air out of lungs.
I’ve complained about this before, and predictably the MMA loyalists say I’m a hopelessly behind-the-times boxing apologist who couldn’t stand the idea that the sweet science had been replaced by a better action sport.
Not exactly. Boxing’s decline has nothing to do with a lack of raw action. It has more to do with a void in the great talent that once dominated the sport. All I want is for someone to realize what a distasteful freak show mixed martial arts is in this bastardized form. What I want is for sane folks to slow down this gradual slide into a post-Apocalypic haze in which the worst elements
of human nature are sanctioned and celebrated. What I want is for us to stop glorifying the most deviant aspects of our own personalities, the ones in which pit bulls, roosters and human beings can be gored, gouged and brutalized for sport, and where intelligence is a fault and the dumbing down of our society is considered a point of pride.
But sadly, instead of halting the slide, CBS is driving the bus directly into the cultural abyss by putting this on national television for the first time, instead of allowing it to wallow in a corner on cable TV with all the other cartoonish “reality” fare.
Ultimate fighting and all the other ultimate fighting leagues want the world to embrace their bloody human cockfighting as a replacement for boxing as a real combat sport, and now they have CBS as a co-conspirator in this fraud. They reason that the world has proclaimed them as legitimate, simply because their barbarism is now on network television.
With that wicked logic, I can foresee an even more ridiculous scenario: Jerry Springer will be petitioning the International Olympic Committee to have the full-contact mayhem and drama that happens on his twisted daily show as an official summer Olympic sport.
Television doesn’t automatically legitimize you. It’s the electronic version of the ladder. The higher you climb, the more of your rear end we can see.
Originating Link: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/columnists.nsf/bryanburwell/story/8B3CB13DD43566378625745B000FBDB2?OpenDocument
Sensationalist drivel at its finest. Did this man even watch the Carano/Young and Lawler/Smith fights? Those were beautiful fights, I don’t see how anyone with half a brain could call those “distasteful freak shows”; I think he just watched the fight promos and decided that was enough material to write his silly column. Considering that he still thinks shots to the groin are allowed, I… God, I just can’t wrap my head around such stupidity.