American Pathetic

The bad news is "American Inventor" is over for Pensacola Beach resident Carlos Patrick Reid. The good news is we won't feel obligated to watch this idiotic television show any more.

Never, ever again. Having watched two installments, it's time for us to take up a book and feel clean again.

As we look back on our two adventures with what passes for "reality TV" we can see, now, that Pensacola Beach favorite Carlos Patrick Reid never really had a chance. He just wasn't pathological or pathetic enough to win. His family didn't look like the four o'clock meds line up on a mental ward.

Before offering a much-too-kind rundown of last night's invention offerings, From Inside the Box has this acute observation:

Once again, the folks producing and editing this show love [the] sensitive tearjerking moment. You could just imagine how thrilled the production folks must have been when they saw a hardened police officer's lower lip trembling as he described how colleagues of his had died, and how his invention may be able to save others in the future. And oh, what glee them must have felt when judge Sarah Blakely started getting weepy at the thought of a deaf boy's struggle to be understood. They even started playing Superman (It's Not Easy), ferchrissakes. Oy.

Not to mention the poor schlub who took his retirement savings from a lifetime in the military and sunk it into a "54-piece cake cutter." His options are narrowing, fast. Maybe the Army recruiters for Iraq cannon fodder have something to offer him.

We hear there is another television program out there somewhere that asks "Are You As Smart As a Fifth Grader?" or something to that effect. The answer, apparently, is no. We aren't. Otherwise, American Inventor couldn't trade on whatever self-debasing urge it is that drives people to appear on programs like that -- or people like us to watch them.

Patrick will be fine, by the way. We understand from well-placed sources that another invention of his is well on its way to market and more are in later stages of development.

Perhaps the experience also has inspired him to invent something new, something really useful. Something that no American home should be without -- say, a voice-activated remote control that turns off the tube every time a viewer says, "What a load of crap this is."