It is, perhaps, altogether fitting and proper that I make my first installment for the new month an apology. I am sufficiently chastened and, in the spirit of reconciliation, humbly offer up what follows as the first of my 12-step process to make suitable amends for past wrongheaded rumblings. Here ‘tis:

Anyone who hurls enough lances at the banality and sheer idiocy of his fellow tribesmen (Homo americanus) can, sooner or later, expect to be compelled to offer an apology. For your humble skeptic, that time has come. By all appearances, my unrelenting assault on one of the most esteemed temples of popular worship - that is to say The First Congregational Church of Anesthesia of the Masses, reality television - has born a threatening harvest. That is to say, my pokes at the lunatic fringe that finds this form of mindless twaddle sufficiently distracting to actually watch it, hour after tedious hour, has roused the Great Unwashed against me. Which is to say, I have stepped on the hairy, gnarled and webbed toes of too many cave-dwelling Cro-magnons and they have, abandoning their subterranean breeding ponds, come forth, clubs in hand, to threaten my repose, not to say my body. In brief, the natives are throughly pissed at yours truly.

Of course, this is not the first time your intrepid rabble-rouser has been in the cross hairs of the froathing fringe. There was the time when I suggested that those tottering has-beens, Al and Jesse, have been rendered impotent by a more enlightened and successful generation of black Americans who prefer personal accountability to the tired "legacy of slavery" tripe. That brought forth a chorus of indignation from critics who, preferring to bask in the glow of the 1960s, still get excited about making placards for the next time Al Sharpton wants to shut down a tunnel and ruin the afternoon of some minimum wage commuter who can’t afford to waste gas, stalled by a picket line, at 50 cents a gallon, much less $4.00 per. And then there was the time when I was impudent enough to suggest that religion, in a direct effrontery to their most basic teachings, was the foremost cause of war, slaughter and mayhem since antiquity. Despite my childish belief in the sanctity of the "freedom of speech" clause of the Constitution, a segment of the Bible-thumping, pulpit-proselytizing, "I, personally, know the Will of God" true believers took rather severe umbrage with that hypothesis. And there was the time, on The American Whiner website, where I awarded a "Whiner of the Week" award to the Pope. I mean, come on, people, the Pontiff blamed his legions of pedophilic priests on American culture, for Christ’s Sake! The man deserved it, dammit!

Sorry. I catch a lot of flack and, well, it starts to wear on you sometimes. Let’s get back to the point: I have an apology to make and I am a big enough man to admit it. (Not to mention that I am a big enough target to take out with a accurate scope and an recently-cleaned rifle.) I apologize - deeply and sincerely - to all fans of reality television everywhere. You have every right to patronize whatever form of entertainment you care to and have an equal inalienable right to cheer and cry your fool heads off for your favorite no-talent every season, vote over your touch tone phones until your fingers bleed, hang posters of Clay Aiken on your closet door (or Reuben Studdard over an entire living room wall), and disagree with Simon Cowell to your heart’s content. That is what makes this land of ours great: you can be an ignoramus and a dim-wit anywhere and anytime you chose. And no one, not me, not your spouse not even your stifled and long-silenced good sense, can make you stop. God Bless America!

I apologize for deriding your decision to waste hundreds of hours a year killing perfectly good (whoa! maybe that is a stretch) brain cells with the excruciating banality of such classic television viewing as "Family Jewels", "The Two Coreys", "Rock of Love" and "Hogan Knows Best" (in the interest of preserving what is left of your I.Q., I refuse to provide links to these cesspools). And, as a special bonus, I can now admit that I even understand why viewing this toxic waste is so essential to the survival of so many. It came to me as if a bolt of crystal clear insight, if not to say empathy. I now understand why millions and millions love reality television. Especially, that subset at the very depths of the depravity that is reality TV, which I shall dub "Celebrity World TV".

Allow me to elaborate: You see, there are tens of millions of Americans who live shallow, meaningless lives dreaming of what they do not have and little else. They have been thoroughly indoctrinated (infected?) with the notion that material glitter - new cars, big houses, glamorous vacations, in brief, "bling-bling" - is what makes people happy and content. They don’t possess these "trappings of success" and never will and, therefore, feel inadequate and empty. Their spouses don’t please them. Their children don’t make them happy. And their jobs, well, they just plain suck. But, in their heart of hearts, they know that if they could only have ________ (you fill in the blanks for your personal craving), they would be happy. They live the dreamy, zombie-like existence of "What if?" and "What could have been."

Now, provide for this teeming multitude a glimpse into the very lives they so desperately want. Show them the lives of the rich and famous. Even the lives of has-beens and never-weres - if they have sufficient bling-bling - will do. These would include: over-the-hill, vainglorious rock stars (Ozzy Ozborne, Gene Simmons, Bret Michaels), burned out pop stars (Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown), burned out rap stars (Flavor Flav), C-list movie stars (Corey Feldman, Corey Haim) and the never-weres ("Anna Nicole Show", "Kathy Harris: Life on the D-List", "Real Housewives of Orange County", "Real Housewives of New York", "Laguna Beach: Orange County", et cetera).

Instantly, you have provided the most cost-effective psychotherapy available. The downtrodden and depressed mob can spend hours voyeuristically gazing at the lifestyles they so desperately crave. The gaudy homes, the limousines, the diamonds and the gala celebrity events all come to life each week, feeding the forlorn with visions of how glamorous a "real" existence can be. As they dreamily stare at their television screens, the growing throng of yearning-to-be-noticed rabble can feed their sense of emptiness and depravity.

But, let the healing begin! As the cult of want-to-be’s watch their heroes strut and preen for the cameras every week, they notice something else even through their zombie-like stare. They begin to observe a basic truth of human life that their parents neglected to adequately teach them while they were lovingly bounced upon their father’s knee or hugged tightly to their mother’s breast. To wit: wealth (real or imagined) does not necessarily produce contentment. The unhappy throng, though never abandoning their fantasy of fame and fortune, can actually be uplifted and fortified to see the miserable, shallow, unproductive and pointless sojourns of their champions.

I know, I know. Though the sage (Hugh Hefner?) has spoken:"Anyone who believes money can’t buy happiness doesn’t know where to shop", it simply ain’t true. The folks who live in big houses, walk the red carpet and wear the bling-bling face the same conflicts, the same boredom, the same stresses and even more of the same addictions that the great unwashed do, and usually in exponential multiples. And, in this realization, therapy takes root. Joe and Jane and their 6 little darlings can see, for themselves, that living in the double wide and shopping at Wal-mart isn’t all that tragic after all. They may not have a yardman, a housekeeper or a Shih Tzu but they are, after all, Christians.

Thus, yet again, I voice my passionate regret for dismissing reality television as a witless, soulless, mindless, senseless and debasing (not to say, insipid) exercise. As I now am pungently aware of the truth of the matter (I am often the last one to catch the train), I appreciate the public service that these productions bestow on their viewers. This format may be the only barrier between the peace of the lemmings and their storming the Bastille of capitalism and good taste and tearing civilization down, root and branch. For, if they can be made to believe that they remain righteous and morally superior to the corruption and degeneracy of the Hollywood aristocracy, they may serenely accept their plight and seek no more for themselves. They can eschew self-improvement, education and the pursuit of a better life with a clear conscious. They have been made aware that those that have tasted "the good life", even fleetingly and long ago, are still one tenuous level above the primeval ooze and, certainly, no better than they are. In fact, they are often less.

In honor of this personal awareness, I hereby pledge to never again belittle reality television or those who dutifully watch it.

Well, at least for the next 10 days. Considering the subject matter, that seems immanently fair.