I was watching TV the other night, just changing channels, and I came upon this show where a tough bald man was advising an easily agitated man on how to be a father. The angry dad would do things like tell his daughter to do her homework, and the daughter, apparently unaccustomed to having parents, would flip out, crying and fleeing the room again and again. And I was thinking, if this little girl grows up to be someone who experiences shame, it’ll be a real treat for her that her dad had her ridiculous behavior recorded by television; if she grows up to be someone without shame, she’ll have the resume for a long career on the Jerry Springer’s of the afternoon. Anyway, from another room the tough man would coach the dad through an earpiece, telling him not to yell or act at all like his daughter, since his doing so is probably how she got that way, but instead to stick to the annoying but innocuous parenting tools they’d practiced, time outs and such.

I was hypnotized by this show, and I’d have happily watched the rest even though I had other things to do. I say hypnotized because I can’t explain why I watched it, and I worry that the people in charge of reality shows have developed a dangerous ability to make anything seem interesting. But then, before a commercial, the title screen appeared. And the jarring feeling I felt then, as the trance broke, like the moment after waking from a strong dream when you realize you don’t really have to hurry to high school, or like one of those illusions in movies where the person realizes at the last moment that the supposed delicacy hanging off their approaching fork is really rancid rat meat. Just as I’d been thinking, “this show is a lot like that show called Super Nanny, but with a guy,” that title crashed into my living room. And you know what it said? “Super Manny”. And the tough guy on the show, his name is Frank, you know. And it just made me think how modern life is a constant trial by absurdity, and the calluses we’re building to cope with all this must be deeply changing who we are. It’s like the Twilight Zone episode where a cowboy time travels to a 1950’s metropolis, and he’s holding his hands to his ears and wincing and crippled by all the noise and light and stimulation. And it’s like how kids in the future will listen to songs that sound like underwater duels between chainsaws, and exist from birth to death as neurons in some blog hivemind, and seem inhuman and alien to us. Suddenly I just thought it was ridiculous that I was watching a show where young girls grow up with their tantrums on television, and to have it called Super Manny. I felt old, and I felt it represented one of the first among many things my generation will come to find unbearable.