A Novel Idea For a New Reality Show

Back in the early eighties, long before anyone dreamed of reality shows like "Survivor" or "The Apprentice," NBC aired an awful proto-reality interview program called "Speak Up America," a wrongheaded show inviting ordinary folks to offer opinions on the issues of the day - many of those opinions being uninformed and dumb enough to make the utterances from Art Linkletter's pseudo-precocious tots from "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" seem Periclean.

In that spirit, I'd like to offer up and idea that offers the fast pace of man-on-the-street shows with the reality shows of today - "Screw Up America." Viewers and studio audiences would vote on who the most incompetent American is. We'd start by rounding up the usual suspects - bureaucrats, automobile designers, NASA engineers, architects - and narrow them down week by week. The most obvious candidates would be the folks who designed the original Hubble telescope (before it was fixed at great expense), the engineers behind most GM cars of the past fifteen years, and the geniuses who misfit the glass panels of the Hancock Tower in Boston and allowed them to fall out of place and onto the streets below, among others. CIA agents who proposed making Fidel Castro's beard fall out would get special attention for their inanity.

We'd make George W. Bush ineligible, not out of respect for his office, but because he's too much of a ringer.