Lately, I’ve been trying to read as many American classic novels as possible.  I realized I can’t very well ridicule people for not having read the great works if I haven’t read them myself.  So it was on Sunday night, when I had the choice of settling down to read Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 or watch the third installment of Bret Michaels’ trashy reality dating trilogy,  “Rock of Love Bus.”  I watched Rock of Love Bus.

After having watched an hour and a half long exhibition of venereal fireworks, I have to declare: I hereby retire from watching trashy television.  It has simply gone too far.

Readers of this blog know that I am certainly no prude – I have taken much delight in past Rock of Love episodes, despite the better-than-break-even chance I might catch hepatitis merely by watching them.  But this new version of the show makes seasons one and two look like Hamlet.  It appears the show’s producers have edited out any scene where a horrifically chemically altered stripper isn’t 1) drunk and pouring beer on another stripper, 2) throwing up and eating Doritos to cover the stench on her breath when she tongue kisses Bret shortly thereafter, or 3) offering to have Bret do a shot of alcohol from her birth canal.  And yes, that absolutely did happen.  Don’t believe me?

I am out of ways to describe this show.  It is simply basic cable pornography, and I can’t justify wasting 13 hours of my life on it.  Economists have a way of measuring the value of time – basically, your time is worth the best possible thing you could be doing with it.  So think of what I could be doing with that 13 hours over the next three months, and calculate all the brain cells I could be strengthening during that period.

As it happens, I just read a book that touched on the womens’ suffrage movement of the 1920s, and all the work women had to do to gain equal rights in this country.  Here we are, 90 years later, and it appears that those hard-fought battles have been parlayed into the right to use your reproductive organ as a shot glass on national television.  Think about it – some child is going to pass through there one of these days – I wonder if he’ll know enough to tip the bartender on the way out.  Of course, that will be the last thing he sees of his mother before spending his boyhood with child protective services.

Now that I think of it, this show might actually be the catalyst to revoking womens’ right to vote.  If any congressman saw 10 minutes of this show, he’d be drafting a constitutional amendment before any of these tattooed slatterns can cancel out the vote of someone who can read.

The paperwork will be filed tomorrow.

With the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on a mission to shame the Legislature into toughening Wisconsin’s drunk driving laws, the topic has gotten a lot of traction lately.  (Incidentally, the Journal-Sentinel is a corporation attempting to influence public policy – a right they effusively argue  should be shut down for every other corporation through campaign finance reform.  But I have blabbed enough about that for a lifetime.)

I don’t have any real angle on this, other than I agree with tightening the laws.  I am generally uncomfortable with newspapers taking such an activist role in trying to influence public policy, but they happen to be right in this case.  In fact, Emily Mills over at the Lost Albatross said it better than I could have, so I’ll just send you over there.  (Although for her, getting an endorsement from me is probably like having Rod Blagojevich appoint her “blogger of the year.”)

But back to the issue of making a third OWI/DUI offense into a felony. Currently, Wisconsin has one of the worst drunk driving records in the nation, with 42 percent of all traffic fatalities involving an intoxicated driver. We read stories about people being arrested for their 6th, 7th, and even 8th offense. If some of those individuals had been charged with a felony on their third strike, it’s far more likely that the subsequent incidents would have never occured.

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We need comprehensive, no-bullshit laws on the books for dealing with this issue. It’s not partisan, it’s personal, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to see that it’s done. Making sure Russ Decker listens to us, and failing that, no longer gets to be Senate Leader (or even a senator), is a good step along the way.

Word.