ALL FIRED UP OVER MTV

This week, dear friends, we have another winner of the "What Were You Thinking?" Award. For those of you who aren’t familiar, this award (a brass boot with a self-inflicted gunshot wound through the toe) is given to the person who, during the awards period, does the most to defeat any notion I might have had that intelligent life exists on this planet. (The "awards period" is defined as any week when I’m slow coming up with an idea for this column.)

This week’s co-winners of the coveted Brass Boot are a 13-year old kid named Jason Lind from Connecticut and his Senator, Joe "Man O’ God" Lieberman. Lieberman, who has made the media his particular whipping boy throughout his career, is particularly incensed these days at MTV, which features a show called "Jackass". The show, according to its publicity, features "Johnny Knoxville and his team of sidekicks performing silly pranks, idiotic stunts, and other stupid stuff." The Jan. 26 segment showed Knoxville hanging steaks all over a fire-resistant suit, lying down on a barbecue, and letting his sidekicks squirt lighter fluid on the grill. For some unfathomable reason, this was supposed to be a real hoot.

Despite the fact that "Jackass" contains multiple disclaimers (such as "these people are idiots") and practically begs viewers not to try these stunts, young Jason Lind and his posse of junior Einsteins decided to re-enact the show in a friend's back yard. Since they didn’t have access to a fireproof suit, Lind decided to go without it. In addition, lighter fluid was apparently too tame for Lind and his team of daredevils, so they used gasoline. Not surprisingly, Lind is now in the hospital in critical condition, with second and third degree burns.

Not to belittle the tragedy here, but I’ve got to ask this kid: what part of "Don’t try this at home" don’t you understand? Furthermore, what on God’s green Earth gave you the impression that the fireproof suit was an optional detail?

Unfortunately, in the modern world, every stupid thing any kid does has to be the fault of either television or pop music. So what easier target than a television network theoretically built around pop music? So the first person Lind’s parents apparently called after the paramedics was Senator Lieberman. Holy Joe immediately leaped into the fray, intoning: ``It is irresponsible for MTV to air these kinds of stunts on a program clearly popular with young teens, to air it at a time when many of them are likely to be watching, and to do so without adequate warnings.''

Adequate warnings? How much warning do you need to decide not to deliberately set yourself on fire? I’ve done some boneheaded things from the age of 13 up until…well, let’s see, how old am I now? I can truthfully say, however, that I never tried to grill myself.

I’m not saying that MTV doesn’t have a lot to answer for. For example, I can only hope there is a special furnace in Hell stoked and waiting for the MTV exec that made the decision to inflict the ferociously untalented Tom Green on us.

I’ll also be the first to admit that some of the stupid things I’ve done were MTV-related, like the whole month in which I tried to look cool by sneering like Billy Idol in that "Rebel Yell" video. Then there was the time I sprained my ankle trying to moonwalk like Michael Jackson. But even in my stupidest moments, I didn’t need MTV telling me that fire can burn you. I didn’t need a warning that, if I really felt the need to douse myself with gasoline and light a match, a fireproof suit would be more or less mandatory if I didn’t want to spend the foreseeable future in the burn ward.

But hey, Lieberman is, after all, a U.S. Senator and I’m merely a semi-professional columnist. Maybe he’s right and I’m wrong. So if you hear about me getting caught in a tropical paradise, high on umbrella drinks and cavorting with a bevy of half-naked bimbos, I hope Senators John Edwards and Jesse Helms will go to bat for me and blame the whole thing on the Fox network. After all, if Fox hadn’t come up with that "Temptation Island" show, I never would have had the idea. And, shockingly, there aren’t any disclaimers on that show that "Chasing strange on the beach may be hazardous to your long-term relationship."

The possibilities are endless. I can blame NASCAR for the fact that I drive too fast. If I orate at length in a self-consciously folksy yet incomprehensible manner, blame it on Dan Rather. If I talk nasty and offend people, it’s all Howard Stern’s fault.

This could be tremendously liberating.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.