The Springer Dish

by Thomas Hart

G21 Staff Writer

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Version 4.0, Event #127 TABLOID HART: THOMAS HART takes in the Jerry Springer Show, and delivers more of the dish. But that's not all: After reading the article, visit Tom's new TRAILER PARK, a place for chat, link listings, and even more of the Gossip & Innuendo you've grown to love. G21 SPORTS: KO's CALLS. KRIS OLSON on Marv Albert, Mike Tyson, Justin Rose and Predictions. In DON'T READ ME FIRST! ROD AMIS' first Publisher's Note from sweltering Santa Rosa, CA. YOUR HOUSE OF CARDS has another new JOKE OF THE DAY! Drop into the G21-WEBTRIPS Satellite Network for great animated cartoons. (28.8 Modem or Faster Recommended.) HIGHLIGHTS OF LAST WEEK's EDITION: BARE KNUCKLES: JEFF WINBUSH comes home to talk about The Media. RADIO ACTIVE: RADIO RAHEEM gets the last word on the GENERATOR 21's two-plus years as a San Francisco magazine.... YOUR VOX POPULI page is updated with all-new Reader e-mails! IRISH EYES: A Special Editorial on the murders of Jason, Mark, and Richard Quinn. POWERSSOUND looks at new music from Jimmy Witherspoon, Benny Golson, and Jorge Pardo. LONDON CALLING! FLISS USSHER, the magazine's Muse, reports from London on our greater CHOICE. ON DRUGS: ADAM J. SMITH exhorts us all to stick to our sense of rationalism during the coming $2 Billion Prohibitionist media blitz. BarnesandNoble SEARCH: Every writer here still reads offline. We support Barnes and Noble and hope you will, too. This is the place to find the best and brightest! For rapid response, use The Message Board HOME

Rock 'em-Sock 'em Trash TV!

AUSTIN, TEJAS - As Tabloid Hart reader "Harley Ford" pointed out on the MESSAGE BOARD, I have yet to say something about the television favorite of the bon-bon munching trailer trash couch potatoes, The Jerry Springer Show.

This show has a very simple formula, from what I can see, of giving viewers the two elements they always crave, Sanitation Engineers, sex and violence. Not blood and guts, shoot-'em-up gore, mind you, just good old fashion almost cat-fights. Usually it's a couple bimbos going after each other, mainly threatening to, that is. And then add a healthy sprinkling of beeped-out words, and women calling each other "'ho'," "slut," "tramp," and the like.

Just those ingredients are enough to get the studio audience crowd into a healthy lather with chants of "Jer-ree, Jer-ree, Jer-ree."

Obviously the trailer park crowd at home likes it, too, since old Jerry has been beating the panties off of soft-core Oprah these days.

But there's a lot of bait-and-switch involved here, folks. I mean, one recent episode Tabloid Hart choked down was entitled, "I Slept with My Sister's Fiance." Thing was, ya'll, out of three sets of guests, only the first set included a woman who had actually pulled this low-rent move. The other two sets of guests were just two women fighting over the same man, a bozo who had no problem admitting that he was dogging them both, and this woman who was dogging two women. There was no tentative marriage planned among these last six people. So what had Jerry Springer's producers done? Set us up.

The best thing going in this tawdry mess was when the cheated woman in the first set of folks mooned the audience to expose the appealing attributes of her own ass as compared to those we had to conjecture about her sister's. Man, that's television entertainment right up there on the top shelf with Masterpiece Theatre!

G21 TABLOID HART means to look at the anomalies in American culture, the strange and all-too-coincidental interstices of success and destruction. Be here every week as we answer the questions enquiring minds have to ask.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do... Now I guess old Jerry closes all these slapfests the way he did that one, with some supposedly heartfelt and homespun wisdom about knowing yourself, monogamy being the right thing to do, or some other such garage. Me, I couldn't figure it out. I was still thinking about that fine black woman in the last segment who had those two white tramps fighting over her. She even admitted that there was a man in her life, too. I guess she's gottah have it. Anyway, this little sermonette of Jerry's is supposed to help calm us down and make us feel like we're better than these losers we been watching for an hour.

I hear that it's supposed to be A Known Fact that Jerry's show pays these people to get up and start bitch-slapping each other, but---from the episodes Tabloid Hart viewed this week--- I'd wager most of these trash would just as likely pay Jerry for the chance to share their "incredible story" with the rest of the trailer trash all over America on TV.

Weekly Celebrity Dish

Tina Brown is in the news again. After being villified to high heaven by your "erudite" types for trashing the New Yorker, Tina got courted away by The Mouse(a.k.a. Disney) to set up her own studio in Lotus Land(a.k.a. Hollyweird.)

Well that was just enough to get the newly nipped and tucked, newly "glamorous" Queen of Trailer Trash herself, Courtney Love, into a big lather, it's reported. You see Courtney is probably still hot under the collar about a 1992 feature on her in Vanity Fair, while the climbing Brit was editor at that magazine, which claimed she was still doing heroin while she was pregnant. According to a story in last Friday's New York Post, Courtney doesn't think the 213 area code is big enough for both her and Ms. Brown.

Hey, Sanitation Engineers! Not tired of the dish yet? Then ya'll are cordially invited to drop on in, and join, TABLOID HART's TRAILER PARK. We have a chat room, for when all of us is loitering there together. And I especially want ya'll to check the Trailer Park Discussion Area. Have a celebrity you hate? An idea as to what we oughtah do? Come on in!

The New York rag(oops! maybe I shouldn't say that now that we're planning on becoming a New York rag) reported that in an interview with Spin magazine, Courtney says: "Not on my f------ time she's not. She enters the 213 area code and I'm going to throw her right the f--- back."

Hey, Jerry Springer! These two are just made for your show! And since I gave ya'll the idea, I know you're going to -- ahem! -- "spring" for my ringside seats, right?

Remember, it will take more than a few tornadoes to blow away all the trailer trash.

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