As a general rule, don’t watch Judge Judy. Don’t do that to yourself. Because if you do, you’ll eventually come across an episode like this.

I don’t watch the show. I just had somebody e-mail me with the link to that disaster.

There’s a very easy way to eliminate the majority of these types of cases. Easy, and cheap as it happens.

Cut ’em off. No more free money. You want to live? Get a job and work for a living. Want an education? Put yourself through school. That probably means a hell of a lot less Women’s Studies and Comparative Lit majors and more doctors and engineers. Which is a feature, rather than a bug.

Dumb-ass Duane from the Judge Judy clip isn’t some freak of nature. There are shocking numbers of kids out there who have that exact entitled, zoned-out mentality and who have been told practically from birth how special they are. It’s those coddled dopes who turned out en masse to vote for Obama in 2008; they were mainlining his “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” bilge, since it was the same therapeutic delusionary rhetoric they’d been fed since pre-school.

Except life has a way of treating you just like Judge Judy treated Duane. There are no jobs for goofballs with Women’s Studies and Comparative Lit degrees anymore, and as our economy burns to the ground we find that insipid self-deception like he displays in front of the TV judge serves as outstanding kindling. Amid the misery, that stuff is the first to go.

You can whine and bitch about how your life was better when you’d mortgaged yourself to the hilt to be a full-time student taking crip courses in an easy major divorced from the real world, but ultimately you’re going to have to grow up and recognize the only way up the ladder is real work. If that means digging a ditch or washing dishes or turning a wrench, or whatever other job you thought was beneath you when you were doing bong hits and taking a survey course on Sylvia Plath or Queer Musicology, then so be it. Eventually you’ll recognize you’re only special based on what you contribute. Unfortunately for Duane, conversations with equally irresponsible and gullible females doesn’t signify a contribution.

And that recognition? Guess what we call that, Duane.

Adulthood.

We are going into the tank as a country. This is, despite the best efforts of our media propagandists, the Obama depression.

And we’re about to have a lot more adults in America than we had just a few years ago, whether Duane becomes one of them or not.