Let’s pluck ‘Duck Dynasty’ and sweep away trailer-trash TV

Having grown up living in a trailer -- but having never, ever watched “Duck Dynasty” -- I feel uniquely qualified to say this: Enough with the trailer-trash TV shows.

I don’t really care which side of the septic tank you stand on regarding the stuff that “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson spouted. Like a mountain lion stalking a deer (an example the show’s fans might like), he was just doing what came natural when he mouthed off about gays, blacks, God and the little woman.

It’s not his fault. It’s America’s. We -- well, fine, not all “we’s” but enough -- first tuned in to the spectacles of TV’s anti-Christ, Jerry Springer. And then the gates of hell opened and out sprang cable TV and the drivel we have today: moonshiner shows, gold miner shows, logging guy shows, Alaska fisherman shows, truck driver shows, polygamists shows -- even doomsday people shows, brought to us by (shudder) National Geographic, the folks who used to be content to publish a pretty good magazine.

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Full disclosure, I don’t much care for ducks, either eating them or hunting them. And the last show I watched with the word “dynasty” in the title starred John Forsythe, Linda Evans, Joan Collins and Heather Locklear -- who, trust me, were all much easier on the eyes than anyone on “Duck Dynasty.”

And I surely don’t have anything against hardworking everyday Americans. That describes me too.

But I also know the trailer life -- been there, done that. I spent a few years crammed into an 8-foot-wide, 50-foot-long trailer with Mom, Dad, two brothers and two sisters. We moved a lot. Sometimes people didn’t want us; sometimes they used names, like “trailer trash.”

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Growing up, my brothers and I (even my baby sister) worked with Dad; he was a pipeline welder. Many of those guys were the salt of the earth, but others could barely read or write. And some of their views, their language, their morals were, to be kind, coarse. What we wanted, and what my parents wanted for us, was to rise above that. So we went to college.

And now I turn on the TV and see that the vulgarity, the racism, the sexism, the crudeness I encountered as a youth is not only being broadcast but celebrated?

No thanks.

We’re better than this, America. To save our sanity, or at least to preserve the memories of real TV shows such as “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” and oh, heck, yes, I’ll admit it, even “Green Acres” (R.I.P, Eva Gabor), we need a tornado to sweep away trailer-trash TV.

The way I see it, we’re at a crossroads, TV-wise. We need to be mad as hell about this garbage. We need to say, “I’m not gonna watch this anymore.” (Props to you, Paddy Chayefsky.)

It’s time to make a choice: The penthouse or the outhouse?

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