LONDON, ENGLAND — Imagine the horror you would feel if you saw your mom or dad showing off your picture to a friend, only rather than show them an actual photograph, he showed them one of those cheap caricatures drawn by sketchy-looking men at state fairs and circuses. Maybe your nose is a little too upturned, your "big" hair portrayed as an afro, that mole on your chin made into a football...and what about that head that's four times the size of your body? Oddly, this is happening to the United States right now; only rather than let someone else present caricature as fact; we're doing it ourselves, with our media.

England is plagued by what is best described as "The Jerry Springer Fallacy." An insidious threat to virtually all Americans, The Jerry Springer Fallacy features two tenets:

The Jerry Springer Show is extremely popular in the United States.

The Jerry Springer Show is an accurate portrayal of American life.

If you grab an average English person off the street and ask them if they watch the show, you'll get an answer identical to that you'd expect in the United States. "Um, no. Never seen it." Further questioning, however, reveals that even though he has never watched the Jerry Springer Show, the average Englishman is at least partially familiar with its workings.

Though the English readily engage in the same denial of viewing habits as the average American, whether Americans are equally ashamed of watching this trash remains an unasked question. After all, if we proudly wear Styrofoam cheese heads and put plastic pink flamingoes in our gardens (erm, backyards), we're much more likely than the English to walk up and down our streets shouting out our die-hard fanaticism for all things Springer.

And the thought hasn't even crossed the average English mind that some episodes, and certainly some parts of episodes, might be fictitious.

"They really make that stuff up?" asked one University College of London student.

What's more, it's not just that the English find it hard to believe the entertainment industry would regale them with false tales of trailer park America. They take this a bit further and assume that the people on Jerry Springer's show represent typical Americans, as if the show's "guests" were chosen at random and its audience conscripted.

This, of course, has positively dreadful ramifications if the United States expects to be taken seriously in the world's politics in the new millennium.

What kind of leader is a nation of Springer-ites likely to elect as its president? Should New York continue to house the United Nations when at any moment a throng of Springer-esque hooligans are likely to burst into the room, pumping their fists and screaming like maniacs any time an American delegate opens his mouth? Would anyone make peace treaties with a nation whose citizens are so predisposed toward violence they often need large, strapping bodyguards to keep them from hurting one another?

As our self-imposed role of purveyors of the world's entertainment continues to dominate our cultural agenda, we need to look closely at the shite (OK, drek) we push off on other countries. Just imagine the type of horrific caricature an English child, raised on a diet of "King of the Hill," "The Simpsons," "The Jerry Springer Show," "Friends," and "Gunsmoke" would come up with when asked to take pen in hand and sketch a typical North American.

Now before you hop in your lorry (truck, sorry), drive back to your trailer and sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend's best friend, pause to think rather the billions (trillions?) of dollars we get from the worldwide syndication of our television shows and movies is worth the face we lose when the rest of the world sees us as a bunch of amoral loonies.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)