America's Funniest Home Videos must stop its deception. Am I wrong? They all seem to be retrieved from giant camcorders that probably went out of style when foreign correspondents stopped using them after the situation in Kosovo. Which is to say, VHS. Consider this, really. Every clip from America's Funniest Home Videos recalls Clinton, the dawn of the Internet, and Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing," while looking washed-out, grainy, and having the audio quality of a Nixon smoking gun tape. You watch five cats fall into aquariums, kids smack each other in the testicles with bats, and grandmothers fall out of rickety patio furniture for forty-plus minutes only to discover that this video was pried out of a dead JVC in a Michigan attic a few years back and things have dramatically changed, sort of. The show now recalls Clinton, the possible regulation of the Internet, and Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing." I don't know. Maybe the slapstick is lost on me. Or maybe it was never there...
Maybe that was uncalled for; I have nothing against Tom Bergeron. I don't. Really. But what kind of anything drops a letter in an acronym, AFV? How many little kids are you trying to confuse?
In the end, cultural touchstones are pretty important, even America's Funniest Home Videos, as they recall the particular moments in history as time folds forward. Truthfully, there have been worse things out there: the Yugo, Red Planet with Val Kilmer, and the Three-Fifths Compromise, to name a few.
In keeping with a sense of self, I suppose we're done here. Sometimes the well of creativity runs dry and the scary little girl crawls from the bottom and out from your TV on all fours, and before you know it you're Martin Henderson and your face looks like a Denny's Grand Slam.
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