The Industrial Powers: Too Much Baggage

Jerry Springer has a classy new game show, where bachelors or bachelorettes on the dating scene are presented with a few possibilities, potential partners who all have "baggage." Their baggage are embarrassing or potentially embarrassing details from their lives. It's represented and exposed inside small, medium, and large cases, the bigger the case the bigger the baggage.

The one I watched today had this very mild baggage from one guy: That he didn't know how to swim. To me, that's "so what" stuff. But then the next guy had this item, that he still sleeps with his baby blanket. It turned out he was the guy the lady chose. But then he rejected her, simply for the fact that her own baggage was that she just so happens to still live with her ex-husband who is a bounty hunter. To be fair, she described her new love's prospects very poorly, that he would have to sneak in because her ex-husband gets jealous, then also that he would have to sneak by a major dog and hack his way through a lot of underbrush.

There's certain things left unsaid, such as, "Would it be possible for you to not live with your bounty hunting ex-husband?" The baggage is just taken as an unchanging given, and in this case he couldn't accept it.

While I was watching the episode I was thinking about something, and admittedly this is a far out fantasy: What if I was on there being wooed by the industrial powers, you know, those blasted titans who savage our world and society, making a royal mess of things in the industrial sections of our cities and towns?

I would see three blasted titans standing there representing the industry, industrialists everywhere. They have their baggage, items like, "I love pollution" and "I've defrauded millions out of their health insurance." I can barely stand to look at these puffy, cigar chomping suits. It becomes a total melee when I reveal my own baggage, that I like to horsewhip industrialists, and I proceed to chase them around the studio with a whip and a war cry.

Jerry Springer steps in to prevent society's revenge against this scourge, and I go off to sulk. "I cannot accept your baggage!"