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Sunday 22 February 2015

Pregnant Teens and Game Show Gauntlets.



Filthy, covetous American capitalists, you can make a reality show out of anything but you can't read the graffiti on the bathroom door. Your greasy fingers, all stiff with arthritis, are expert at pie-dipping, and yet it is I, a lowly Irish college student with habits I can't afford, that is going to be the one to make you even richer. Wait, put away that flag and bald eagle bust, you don't need to pretend this has anything to do with patriotism, your newsreaders' and celebrities' bibs are already brimming with that stomach-churning glop, you're okay, no one's watching. Let's rap.

Now, you've stuck cameras in the faces of everyone from celebrity wives to inbred trailer mutants, and you have done so with the shamelessness of a dog shitting on a child's hopscotch court, so my proposal shouldn't be any more outrageous than anything you've already done before. We both know that the number one problem in your country today, ahead of gun-wielding racism and obesity, is pregnant teenagers. It's not so much that unplanned parenthood is the problem, but rather the fact that your teenagers are already grossly stricken with self-entitlement enough without having the added attention of pregnancy on them. They groan and they whine and they Snapchat and cry, all the while your television crew are backing up into their front gardens to film them for a few days here and spend the rest of the week editing out moments when their bladders failed them on their €1,000 couches. You're giving them too much leeway, capitalists, you need to make sure they know who rolls the cheques.

You're all about entertainment and so am I, so my proposal is simple. Rather than film these snarling child-bearers drive their SUVs into white picket fences, why not make them do battle with each other, or a team of highly-trained athletes, in a gauntlet style game show extraordinaire? Watch 13-year-old Betty attempt to fight her way past eight Kendo warriors who have been starved, water-boarded, and brainwashed for weeks leading up to the event. Marvel as Sarah, eight months in, tries her hardest to zip-line through the thunder dome without irking the wrath of Panther, almost 400lb of muscle, rage, and easily irritable PTSD.

I'm not even going to begin to write up what kind of a budget we're looking at for this one, because I know you're so used to spending most of your money recruiting the subjects and paying video editors to make them look even more repulsive than they actually are. Without going too deeply into digits, I'll tell you we'll need a "thunder dome", make of that what you will. We'll need giant pillars for contestants to hop across. We'll need high-powered canons to fire bean bag rounds at them as they unicycle across tight ropes. We'll need to pay the athletes a little bit extra for their troubles, laying the smackdown on pregnant women is not easy on the sleeping pattern. And finally we'll need a studio audience to record laugh-tracks for when our teens ultimately fail.

As I said, I won't talk numbers here, but I do hope you're reading, my heartless television executives. We can pave a road to a bright future for ourselves and our families, so long as that road is carved out on the backs of pregnant teenagers.




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