The Bachelor’s Brad Womack: Should We Kill Him?

by Davis B.

Do you watch The Bachelor? No? You don’t even own a TV? Huge waste of time? You’d rather read? America is so dumb? No, yeah, totally. Me too. I mean, my wife watches, and I’ll be in the same room surfing the internet, really only paying attention when she nudges me and rewinds the DVR to show me the part where Chantal pushes Shawntel into the hot tub. OK, maybe I watch a little more than that, but it’s mostly just to make fun of it, to stand at a knowing remove, measuring the depth and speed of America’s decline. Can you believe the people on this show? Are they for real? Ha ha, so stupid. That’s why I watch.

Oh, and I guess I watch because it’s my favorite show on TV, and I get excited when I wake up on Mondays and realize it will be on that night, and because I have serious, genuine, intense feelings and thoughts regarding the contestants and their actions.

The first question those of us who love The Bachelor have to ask ourselves is, “Should we feel guilty about it?” My answer is, “Yes, absolutely. But we do, so let’s move on and talk about Brad Womack.”

For those of you who haven’t kept up to speed, wink wink, Brad Womack is this season’s Bachelor, and in fact has made United States history by being the first person to be the Bachelor twice. I guess that’s because everyone else who has served our country as the Bachelor or Bachelorette is happily married to the contestant to whom they extended that last, lovely rose. For example, human rights activist Matt Grant and bioethicist Shayne Lamas are by all accounts enjoying a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship, having beaten a hasty retreat from the garish glare of celebrity, united in the sentiment that going on The Bachelor was a distasteful but necessary means to the end of finding lasting, true love.

So Brad is back for round two, and let me tell you, America is not very happy with him! What has he been up to since he was last on the show? Copious amounts of therapy, to fix the darkness inside of him. Brad, don’t even so much as GLANCE in the direction of that hot tub until you have had so much therapy, America says sternly. And once Brad’s therapist talks about just how much therapy Brad needed, Chris Harrison starts in on him. And once Chris is done, the two finalists from Brad’s first season, DeAnna and Jenny, are brought on. Everything goes pretty well until DeAnna’s head spontaneously combust in an explosion of contemptuous rage. DeAnna is not at all happy about what Brad did to her. Indeed, an examination of the transcripts from the following season when DeAnna was the Bachelorette has revealed that “After what Brad did to me,” was the third most-uttered phrase (after “Not here for the right reasons,” and “Stephen Hawking has been good for the profession overall, but technically I find him a little wanting”).

After DeAnna, the contestants vying for Brad’s black, unknowable heart appear, anxious to outdo one another in questioning Brad’s intentions and sanity and good faith and right to live. And then one lady slaps him really hard across the face, like a drunken father who is also the little league coach for his uncoordinated son. Brad grimly accepts this great deluge of abuse as his just and proper due, tightening the cilice around his thigh every time he is reminded of his crime.

So what, exactly, was the crime? This is the story, as best I can tell: The night before the final rose ceremony of Brad’s first season he slipped out of Bachelor Manor and flew on a forged passport to the small Western African nation of Equatorial Guinea. Using the prestige and connections associated with his status as the Bachelor, Womack persuaded the country’s military to overthrow the democratically-elected President and place the newly-minted Brigadier General Major Womack in her stead. Womack’s first official action was to order the execution of the President, her entire cabinet and their families. The executions were televised on the series finale of The Bachelor, with Womack saving one single survivor by extending them a rose — for once validating Chris Harrison’s promise that this would indeed be the most dramatic rose ceremony yet.

OK, real talk. I am not 100% positive that Brad mounted a violent coup in Equatorial Guinea; I’m just making an educated guess that that’s what happened based on everyone’s reaction to Brad on this week’s season premiere. But since this is a news piece, and that makes me an irrepressible cub reporter, I am going to do a little fact-checking, on Wikipedia.

Oh, wow, this is embarrassing. Apparently Brad did not execute innocent women and children on live TV. I guess everyone wants to mash Brad’s face into the wall and just keep doing it over and over and over again until a great, red debt has been paid because … he … wait, hang on, this can’t be right. It’s because he decided not to give a rose to either of the final contestants? Because he told both of them he didn’t want to marry them and walked away without a fiancée?

America, I don’t know how to say this, but I think for the first time in like 150 years we have made a mistake. What he did was sort of the decent thing here, right? Like, imagine you realize you’re not really into either of these ladies, and so, rather than just choosing one to get out of a suuuuuuuper awkward situation, and leading her to believe you love her and want to marry her, and taking her on all the talk shows and talking about your new life together, and texting other ladies and have them sell the texts to US Weekly, and then waiting a few months for things to blow over, and dumping her, you just man up, right there on national TV, and admit that you’re not into either of them? That seems like the kinder, better course of action, no?

Yes. Yes! And you know what? This is the moment I’ve been waiting for ever since I read To Kill a Mockingbird. One person can make a difference, and I’m going to be that person. Join me in trying to get America to think Brad Womack is awesome, and did the right thing, and that the huge crucifix tattoo on his back was probably done ironically. Everyone meet at my house to make some posters!

But seriously, Davis B. just watches The Bachelor as a joke. He’s never gotten butterflies before a rose ceremony. He blogs at dontdodumbthings.com. He photoshopped this picture to make it look like he is bald and chubby and wearing a bow tie so ladies wouldn’t try to date him, since he is already married.