“Did you know a guy named Scott?”

“No?”

“Oh, I figured all you white guys would’ve hung out together down there…”

“No, all the other white guys were Camero-driving assholes from Jersey.”

That was a conversation between myself and a police officer, on the side of the road, relating to my experiences at college in NYC.

Not since I left New York City have I given much thought to guidos; what goes for a ‘white person’ in the greater New York area. A ‘guido’, an epitaph typically describing someone of Italian descent, who may or may not smell like salami and olive oil, and may or may not have a thin gold chain and crucifix caught in their mane of chest hair, used to be a bad thing. I recall many instances of walking past my favorite pizza place in downtown Manhattan and seeing a bunch of greasy, olive-toned, muscle bound assholes in tight t-shirts arguing about the Yankees and Mets.  Arguing so loudly that even down in the subway I could still hear who thought which team had better pitching last season.

But now, as Quakers, Shakers, Protestants and Jews have come before them, the Guido has taken pride in what used to be a despairingly uncouth moniker. At least that’s what the kids on “Jersey Shore”, MTV’s new reality-based television show, would like you to believe.

Honestly, I’ve watched a total of maybe 12 minutes of the aforementioned show. The condition I viewed the program was part media-fueled controversy, part curiosity. I expected to sit back and observe the rituals of young men and women about their natural habitat, the southern New Jersey beach communities during the summer, to explore personal growth and inward thinking…

…I’m just kidding. I fully expected to laugh my ass off at haplessly brain-dead jocks and spoiled-bitch bimbos as they attempted to spend their summer handing off the same STDs to each other.

In the show’s defense you can’t go into it expecting anything other than “The Real World”.  Well, the “Real World” if all its cast members had decided to spend their years in high school huffing glue. Anyone who goes into viewing this program with an expectation of being seriously entertained obviously has never watched any of MTV’s other programs.

With that said, “Jersey Shore” is only intended for hardcore reality television fans. I watch a lot of sleazy competition-based reality TV (VH1′s Rock of Love, etc) and even I could barely stomach how depraved this show is.

To wit, all I really got in the end was sheer boredom and a sense of self-hate. I watched the first act of the second show as my wife and I made Xmas cookies to bring into my work. What I witnessed for eight and a half minutes were conversations about hair gel, tanning, mutant-like abdominal muscles, and what I assume to be Italian Pride, though it’s hard to understand what anyone’s saying, because everyone on this show talks like Rocky Balboa with a bad cold.

I was introduced to six or seven characters. Everyone is a gender-based stereotype; each guy on the program is a muscle-bound he-man with a blow-out hair cut that looks like he’s wearing a Blooming Onion from Outback Steakhouse on his head. Each girl is an obnoxious, over tanned slut with too much lip gloss and not enough common sense to know that if you take all your clothes off and get into a hot tub within a matter of minutes after meeting your new housemates, you will be judged heatedly.

What really gets me is that none of these kids are really all that attractive. After X amount of seasons of “The Real World”, you could depend on MTV to at least supply wholesome-looking, fresh-faced 20-somethings that I could at least imagine in some sort of orgy fantasy. The kids they picked for “Jersey Shore” look like aged mafia movie extras from central casting, still trying out for roles ten years their junior.

The house looks like any of the houses from “The Real World” only with “Scarface” posters every ten feet. Also, extensively featured are pictures of the Italian flag, the Italian flag with the Lamborghini emblem in the middle, the Italian flag with the State of New Jersey in the middle, the Italian flag with a bottle of Muscle Milk in the middle, the Italian flag as a bathing suit (both men’s and women’s) and as an undergarment (use your imagination.)

To say that “Jersey Shore” doesn’t pander to Italian stereotypes is like saying “The Sopranos” television series never killed anyone. I fully understand why the Italian-American league has a super huge problem with this show, as well as the Southern New Jersey Chamber of Commerce: It paints the people and area to look like a pack of dicks who take pride in being trash.

But if the shoe fits, celebrate it by punching someone in the face in a bar parking lot, or by complaining about having to work more than one day a week – you’ll fit right in.