The Reality that is Duck Dynasty

Vince’s son was over the other night and he took control of the channel changer lest I get a hold of it and force them to watch Beaches or Ghost of some other seriously weepy chick flick. 

So what did he choose?  Duck Dynasty. Duck. Dynasty.  Have you seen this show?  It is a veritable train wreck! And, despite the fact that I had my iPad to keep me company, I couldn’t help but listen to the show.  Sometimes I even had to look up and watch when something really bizarre transpired. And that apparently happens a lot in this program.

Oh man, I thought, as a society, how much lower can we possibly sink?

Whenever I think we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel in reality television, shows like Duck Dynasty come along and prove me wrong. 

In this particular episode, the men in the Robertson family decide to blow up the old guy’s deer blind because it’s all rickety and falling apart and whole lot of snakes have taken up residence.  Eww, snakes. If I watch too much of that sort of thing I’ll end up having nightmares, so I concentrated really, really hard on my iPad until they moved beyond the snakes and started rigging up the explosives.

Then one of the men – and don’t ask me to identify him because all I can tell you is that he was wearing camouflage and had long, scraggly hair and an even longer scraggly beard.  If you haven’t watched the show, you should know that they ALL have long scraggly hair and even longer scraggly beards, so it makes it tough to tell one from another. At least initially, I assume.

But, anyway, one of them decides it would be an excellent idea to build a platform and hoist an old camper trailer thing up there to serve as their new deer blind.

Sheesh. Give a redneck a few bucks…

But that’s exactly what they did.

I kept expecting someone to get hurt or the platform to come crashing down, camper and all, but that never happened. Instead, they all just complained about how lazy some of them were being and one of ‘em talked about an old blue plastic Tupperware cup he has been carrying around since the Vietnam War.  Huh. Such an education one can get from watching these sorts of programs, eh?!

At the end of the show they brought the camera inside the newly created deer blind – and it was not what I expected. They had refurbished the inside of the camper and had either rigged it up with electricity or had some sort of generator to provide enough juice to run all sorts of electric appliances like coffee makers and microwaves.  Not only that, but they were all shiny new appliances.

These guys may look like indigent scraggly rednecks, but they’ve got enough serious bank to make their next hunting season pretty cushy.

Meanwhile, their wives were back at the house holding a garage sale. They were getting rid of all sorts of junk.  The only problem was, it was the men’s junk. I didn’t see that ending well, especially when they sold the patriarch’s ratty, old recliner.  It was rather amusing when the men drove toward home and saw various items heading in the other direction, including said recliner loaded in the back of a pickup truck. 

There was another scruffy-looking guy walking along the road carrying his garage sale find: a stuffed squirrel mounted on a piece of wood. When the Duck Dynasty guy saw him, he stopped and bought his own stuffed squirrel back from the guy.  At twice the price the man paid for it!

Somewhere in there is a lesson in economics, but I was so taken aback with the fact that he would want to display a stuffed squirrel, I ignored the lesson. 

All I can say is I was very relieved when the menfolk in the household walked out of the room and I was able to grab the remote.  I immediately cleansed the inside of my brain with an episode of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.  No, not really. It was one of those Real Housewives shows.

No, honestly, people.  I flipped channels for a few minutes. And then I turned it off. 

Ah. That’s better.