I left the Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre last Thursday afternoon amazed at how well the GW student body, including myself, could kiss the ass of Jerry Springer. Now it is true the times that I have seen “The Jerry Springer Show,” I enjoyed it. A good laugh at the expense of others will always appeal to the darker side of my nature.

However, I find it hard to watch his show without flinching at the guilt that accumulates in my stomach and stretches up into my throat. You see, “The Jerry Springer Show” really has nothing to do with Jerry Springer, the person. It is a functioning entity of its own; it is a vulture that feeds off of the dying and the dead. It thrives off of the conflict on the stage.

Springer is a clever man; he demonstrated his nimbleness to us all when he admitted to running a “stupid show.” Jerry knows the power of his show. He knows that it is a parasite in the worst sense of the word, and that is why Springer lives outside of it, parading his “ethics and the media” to our school, so as not to be devoured by it.

Jerry is a genius in his own right. But he gets no respect from me. While I do believe that to ban “The Jerry Springer Show” is to descend one step closer to the world George Orwell depicted in 1984 I do not want men like Jerry Springer – intelligent men, brilliant men that could be so much more than hosts of conflict-breeding television shows – feeding me ethics.

Springer is not the problem, but just another gear in our greedy system; after all, he claims to have been pushed into the talk show genre. We are the problem, everyone. You and me. I have a feeling that if we do not watch Springer’s show with a critical eye, we are no different than the masochistic mobs in the film The Running Man. Are we?

-Jeremy Daniel