Dancing with the stars

My family loves Dancing With the Stars...
to the point that when I call home when an episode (or even a rerun)is on, they ask me to call back when its over.

My grandma sits on her couch, her heating pad cranked up to soothe her arthritic back. She eats popcorn and drinks some root beer and has a night of pure enjoyment.

My aunt calls her friend in New York after each episode to chat about who got kicked off and how lovely XYZ performed and how ungraceful and cocky ABC was.

My dad dotes over DEF's foxtrot and my mom criticizes the judges for being too harsh on GHI. My dad grabs the remote and cranks up the volume when a good ballad with jazz chords is chosen as a couple's accompaniment. My mom reaches for the remote to bring the volume back down to normal at commercial breaks.

Basically they all really and genuinely dig this shit, and my guess is that they are just a microcosm of a Dancing With the Stars-loving-society.
This leaves me thinking and then mumbling under my breath, "What is this world coming too?"
hmmm...this line sounds all too familiar. Why have I heard that before?

My Pop pop used to say it "What is this world coming to?" about the Beatles and their long hair. A barber,Pop pop was as straight edge as the razors he used. He was pretty sure that long hair would lead to the downfall of the country. But even my Pop pop, I think, if he were still alive, wouldn't like Dancing with the Stars. He'd shuffle past the cable box and flip on horse racing instead, my grandma, all the while, hopelessly pouting and pleading with him to go back to the dance show.

My dad used to say, "what is this world coming to?" to me. I'd be watching MTV Real World, and it never failed. As soon as Dad would walk into the living room the parts where Ruthie was sobbing and squealing out "I just can't do this fucking shit anymore. Its just too much" and then guzzling liquor or the parts where Lindsay and Cara were grinding in the club, or the parts where Jay was revealing that he was Bi-sexual in the hot tub... Dad would always walk in at these moments and would shake his head, roll his eyes, and say "What is this world coming to?" Sometimes he would follow it by saying, "These people are all unstable, and they all have emotional problems. Don't they?"
But Dad, Don't we all?...have emotional problems? Don't we all just want to feel good?

So Dancing With the Stars is a FEEL GOOD show. It is entertainment. It exposes the world...the football loving, un-artsy world that may never experience dance in their day to day life, to ballroom dance. It makes people smile. It makes my grandma forget about her aching back, my Aunt forget that she lives alone, and my parents forget that they are almost senior citizens. So I pose the question to myself:
What is wrong with a show that does this? AND What is wrong with the world that appreciates it? Maybe I am the pretentious bitch for being completely opposed to the show.

I have lots of reasons why I oppose to the show and enjoy thinking of myself as a fairly unpretentious and unbitchy person. I will post them soon.