Just a reminder to all the mouth-breathers out there: Reality TV is not real.

Back in the day, people would wander around with needles and wax, tape recorders, video cameras or even film cameras and take "documentary" footage. The earliest successful documentary was Nanook of the North, which is still a striking film.

Of course, plenty of Nanook was staged, and like any documentary, it presents a biased and incomplete portrait of its subject(s).

Remember Marlin Perkins and "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom?" Largely staged. Perhaps you might think that "Marty Stouffer's Wild America" was more pure, since it appeared on PBS. You'd be wrong. Oh, the general scientific information presented was close enough, but the actual footage was often staged. Predators were tipped off as to the presence of prey, streams were stocked with extra fish, etc.

I don't worry too much about all that. Remember the furor over Edmund Morris's Dutch, his biography of Ronald Reagan than invented a character to serve as Reagan's lifelong "audience?" Okay, so there wasn't such a person. But Morris's point was that Reagan believed in and needed that "audience" in order to do what he did. Does the invention of the character make the actual biography less true in the larger sense?

People have to parse whatever information comes their way. There are no such thing as "pure" facts. There is no such thing as an absolutely "fair" competition. no two people (or two animals or two plants or whatever) are perfectly matched. The point of the competition is to determine a winner. And that winner will have proven to be better at that contest, not better in any meaningful way.

Take the nonsense over Bristol Palin and "Dancing with the Stars." I have never watched the show. I'm not going to watch the show. But I do read the newspaper, and plenty of people are bent all out of shape by the fact that there might be some "conspiracy" helping Palin to win the contest, despite the possibility that she might be an execrable dancer.

This is dumb. "Dancing with the Stars" doesn't even bother with the niceties of documentaries. It is a piece of entertainment, and the fact that Palin keeps garnering attention to the show means that she is doing very well in this contest. Can you name any of the other contestants? I can't. But I keep hearing the whining about Palin. She's a winner!

Good for her. She got to skip the internship in egregious overexposure (figurative and literal) and jump right into the plum position of experienced cultural opportunist. If she's smart, she'll use her fame to raise money for her cause, which appears to be telling teenage girls not to put out because boys (gasp!) are after only one thing--and that thing isn't love, commitment, hugs or forever after.

It's not the most original message, but at least it happens to be good advice given (for the most part) earnestly. I can live with that.

If you're really angry about the whole Bristol Palin thing, find something else to piss you off. Like the increasing distance between the haves and have nots in American society. Or the fact that more and more companies are making lots of money and not hiring. Or the fact that come next October it's very likely that the NFL, the NBA and the federal government will all be shuttered.

But you will be able to watch next year's installment of "Dancing with the Stars." And when Sarah Palin (who will enter just to show everyone that she can dance better than her daughter) wins, she'll announce "I'm goin' to Washington. You betcha!"

Is that real enough for you?

Jon Worley has seen a few episodes of "Project Runway," though he's usually reading The New Yorker instead of paying attention to the snipping and the sniping.