Red-Blue Gladiators: A New, Gratuitously Violent Politically Themed TV Show!
Both ends of the political spectrum would be matched up by artificial intelligence to maximize both public venom and personal hostility.
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM / LIGHTSPRING
by Rich Herschlag
Here in the spring of 2022 I am blessed. Not that things in the world are so great. COVID-19, though effectively tamped down, has evolved into COVID-22. Inflation has stimulated fear of the Fed if not the fear of God. There are still mass shootings every couple of days and skirmishes in the Middle East. A full 23 percent of the American populace still believes a ring of pedophiles controls everything from interest rates to the latest flavor of Sprite. Yet in spite of all this—or perhaps because of it— the stupidest idea I ever had became the number one television show in the country.
There I was one day in June 2021 riffing with a friend, telling him there ought to be a show where an average Joe from the right and an average Joe from the left go mano a mano. Back in sleepaway camp in 1975 there was that counselor who always told us to settle our differences in the ring. He gave us a pair of gloves, took out his whistle, and a few rounds later we were too tired and banged up to resume our petty argument. Well, there was no reason this concept couldn’t be applied to the entire country and turned into an ATM.
Over the years, I had pitched plenty of ideas to friends of friends in the television industry. There was Back in the Hood, about kids who had fought their way out of poverty and eventually returned to the old neighborhood to reinvest in the community. There was Dear Donor, where we connected people with rare blood types and each week saved a life. There were some long shots and some near misses, but network executives all agreed there was always something missing—gratuitous violence.
On a lark that one day in June 2021 I jotted down some notes and turned our phone chat into a one-sheet. Red-Blue Gladiators would draw on applicants from both ends of the political spectrum matched up by artificial intelligence to maximize both public venom and personal hostility. The buildup would feature six days of name-calling, stereotyping, and direct threats culminating in a five-round cage match in front of an arena of bloodthirsty fans and a home audience tired of American Idol. In addition to the tribal political pride at stake each week, the show needed to matter. To the victor go the spoils. A blue victory meant 100,000 doses of the vaccine went to Madagascar. A red victory, and free ammo to the entire city of Wheeling, West Virginia.
I emailed the pitch to the usual suspects less as a sincere solicitation and more as a biting commentary on their chosen profession. My goal was for at least 10 of the emails to be opened and to receive at least three curt emails back. Instead, by the following Monday I had meetings lined up with FOX, CBS, ESPN, and Nickelodeon. I brought along a friend, Dan, from the local car dealership who pretended to be my agent. I gave him an OxyContin from a leftover prescription and made him promise not to laugh or pee himself. Somehow, we walked out of there with multiple six-figure offers.
TNT made the best offer. We would control 51 percent of the show in perpetuity, split royalties from reruns, and get 10 percent of merchandizing revenue off the top. Dan and I thought it was all for naught when a death occurred during the pilot. Ironically it was the 155-lb guy who volunteered at Planned Parenthood putting the 215-lb guy who worked at Cabela’s in a headlock and not having a clue as to when to let go.
I felt terrible as we walked down the hall to see the head of programming and was prepared to donate half our advance to the family of the deceased, but instead I received a hero’s welcome. The buzz was through the roof. There were already millions of tweets calling for a rematch between the Planned Parenthood guy and the dead Cabela dude’s pissed off brother-in-law. Suddenly we had a contract for 13 shows, an option for 13 more, and a franchise offer from Vince McMahon.
The ensuing weeks were largely a blur. I remember objecting to the guy from Baton Rouge wearing the KKK robe and the guy from Portland wearing the tutu. I didn’t want that type of objectification and exploitation of honest policy disagreements, but Dan showed me in the fine print that in exchange for majority ownership we had little to no control over creative content. More than 43 million tuned in that night to see the KKK win with a piledriver that left a lifelong Democrat in traction with moderate nerve damage to the L3 vertebrae.
It got crazier from there. As is always the case in the land of the free and the home of the brave, celebrities got involved. The buildup in Atlanta was unprecedented. Fresh off a gunfight on the floor of the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene promised to wipe the canvass with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ironically backed out at the last minute to put the finishing touches on yet another version of the Green New Deal. With the grudge match of the century now shelved and a Pay Per View audience irate (as Joe Pesci said in Casino, always the dollars!), Val Demings stepped in to save the day and body slam Madge, causing a concussion, brain damage, and appointment to the House Intelligence Committee.
Reno was either the low point or the high point of the season, depending upon who you asked. After a city ordinance required separate seating for red and blue spectators following a bloody melee in Tallahassee, there was some hope of perhaps only a limited aftermath. Those hopes died in a pretzel hold just moments after Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman defeated Ted Nugent in a TKO. Some hours later, the Reno Events Center was a shambles and over 500 people were taken to various area hospitals where fistfights, knife fights, and merciless trolling on Facebook carried over to ERs, ORs, and staff cafeterias. Starting with Texas (yes, Texas) a series of statewide bans on the sport were issued and season two became a question mark.
Today, I am chastened. I am still trying to reconcile with my wife of 34 years. Along with TNT, ViacomCBS, and Mr.McMahon, I am trying to settle over three dozen lawsuits and finding a half billion dollars doesn’t go as far as it once did. At the very same time, I am fielding numerous offers from foreign countries including Russia, Belarus, the United Arab Emirates, and Honduras. They say the potential to monetize culture wars and economic disparity is virtually unlimited and even if we get kicked out of another country every half-season or so we can go strong till mid-century. Roger Stone himself called me the other day to tell me I’m a fool to leave all that money on the table.
But I don’t know. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist but my initial rationalization for this whole juggernaut was, honestly, nostalgically—just like at Camp Tawonga back in 1975—to settle it in the ring. To bury the hatchet and go roast marshmallows together, steal a six-pack and drink it in the woods, hand out oregano and see who pretends to get stoned. Instead, red-on-blue violence is equaled only by blue-on-red violence and the only purple things in the country are the arms, legs, and torsos of young men dragged half-dead out of nightclubs. I am alone and scared and ashamed and confused and disillusioned and disappointed. Most of all, I feel like the ghost of Rodney King wandering the hallway late at night wondering, wondering . . . Why can’t we all just get along?
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The Washington Post Celebrates Endless Bloodshed
“In warfare, the future is now”, is a fawning ode to the joys of weaponized drones with a dangerous dose of American technocratic myopia slathered over the entire thing.
Image: Wildnrg, CC BY-SA
by Justin Rosario
I very rarely write follow ups to my articles because there is so much going on in the world that there just is not enough time to revisit a specific story, much less my own take on said story. But the Washington Post dropped an op-ed that was so jaw-droppingly horrifying that I kind of have to double dip. The scariest part is that it came not from Hugh Hewitt, their not-so-closted MAGA, but from David Ignatius, a respected journalist.
“In warfare, the future is now”, is a fawning ode to the joys of weaponized drones with a dangerous dose of American technocratic myopia slathered over the entire thing.
Saints preserve us.
What’s Wrong With Drones?
Nothing. And everything. Drones are a tool, but like any tool, they can be abused. Which we have. A lot.
Back in March, I wrote a kind of review for Netflix’s “Outside the Wire”, a really good scifi movie about the future of drone warfare. During the writing of this review/commentary on drones, I had the unique experience of arguing myself into an opposing viewpoint. I went in generally supporting the idea, if not current execution, of drone warfare and came out adamantly opposed to it.
Until that moment, I had not really considered where it was all heading. Once I looked at the entire picture, there was no outcome I could see that was not a dystopian nightmare for both Americans and the world abroad.
Turning war into a video game is incomprehensibly dangerous. Take away the emotional cost of pulling the trigger for a drone pilot and killing becomes the first resort, not the last. Put that decision in the hands of an A.I. and war becomes orders of magnitude worse.
Here is what I wrote about autonomous drones that could replace troops on the battlefield (called “Gumps” in OTW):
If we were to ever develop “Gumps”, we would absolutely wage never ending war. We’re already doing it because of how (relatively) few troops we lose a year. If we reduce that number to near zero? We would be involved in every single conflict across the globe and those conflicts would somehow never resolve. Too bad for the hundreds of millions caught in the crossfire, though. They’re not our problem, right?
The main impediment to the United States waging (profitable) unlimited war across the globe forever and ever is human cost. Not to the people we slaughter by the hundreds of thousands and bomb into poverty, starvation, and disease, but the human cost to us, America. Even if a “small” number of our troops die each year, thousands are injured and tens of thousands (if not more) are psychologically scarred for life. Suicide among veterans is an epidemic for a reason.
Once you eliminate that cost? There is nothing but endless horror on the other side of that equation.
And yet, here is David Ignatius salivating over those future wars:
Wars of the future may look like video games, as operators control faraway swarms of autonomous systems, but the lethality on the ground will be devastating. What’s encouraging is that people like Tseng and Brose are taking their frustration with the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and turning that knowledge into new systems that will keep U.S. troops safer, at lower cost — even as they combat future adversaries.
This is the worst-case scenario I wrote about. I quoted an article on drone operators calling the half-sized set of pixels on their screens “fun-sized terrorists” before blowing them up. They were talking about the children they were killing.
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