What is it with the fascination with “extreme” over the past few years? People use it in reference to everything.

First you got your extreme sports. You know, the stuff you see on ESPN at 3 a.m. on Easter Sunday. Really great stuff, like high-altitude, upside-down monkey-shaving.

In fact, it seems like a number of things that were just plain stupid a few years ago are now sporting events.

I remember when jumping off a cliff with a skateboard was just plain stupid; now it’s on T.V., with judges measuring spin, speed and hang time.

And will someone please explain to me the point of jumping out of an airplane with a bicycle? I’ve seen at least three dozen commercials with some guy riding a $600 mountain bike into the stratosphere.

Sorry Turbo, no matter how fast you peddle, your Huffy is still going to crash to the ground, probably killing a family of badgers.

Extreme is a real key in advertising, too. In fact, the two are linked. In general, the fool on the bicycle is also busy sipping a Mountain Dew someone fired at him like a cannon shot.

And I think we all know just how extreme Surge commercials are. Personally, if I’m going to race six flannel warriors up a muddy underpass, it’ll be for a hell of a lot more than a can of piss-poor soda.

Of course, it’s obvious that people want extreme … well, everything.

We want everything to be bigger, faster, flashier, more heartwarming, and, of course, more old-fashioned than it has ever been before.

No matter what the event, emotion, or whatever, we want it more extreme. We’ve even gotten to the point where we want more extreme news.

Do you remember when they only used to interrupt T.V. programming if something important was happening, like the president or Burt Reynolds was shot. Anymore if some guy’s tool shed catches fire they interrupt “The Young and the Restless” with team coverage.

Not only that, but whenever there is a national crisis, or at least a modern interpretation of a national crisis, within minutes the crisis has a catchy name and high-resolution graphics.

“Crisis at the White House,” “Terror on the Hill,” “Monkey Run Away From Circus,” we’ve all seen them.

The news is naturally extreme, it’s immediate, it’s new, it may even be shocking. So why not spice it up a little more with music and flashing lights?

And I’m not even talking about the trashy television news magazines.

I think everyone already takes them with a grain of salt. But everybody working in the news industry knows that the more extreme the story, the easier the sell.

So what’s the most extreme story you could find to spice up the news? Well, it probably has to do with the president.

And what’s the most extreme thing we can do to the president? Why, impeach him, of course.

In the news, like everywhere else, we want to see things pushed to a level they haven’t been to before.

Since we’ve never impeached a president, it seems like something we’d want to see. Pretty extreme and all.

And so we are willing to blow everything out of proportion.

If Clinton lied about an affair, he committed perjury, and so of course he’s not fit to be the leader of the free world. We’re as extreme about our values as we are about everything else, so sinners cannot be tolerated.

I can’t help but wonder where this is all leading? If Clinton is to be impeached for lying about an affair, where will the standard bar be set for the next president?

Lying is one of the most fundamentally human flaws I can think of. But that doesn’t matter, we won’t accept it from OUR president.

Why not? The answer I hear most often is that as our leader, the president needs to be a representative of all that is good in our country. In other words, he needs to be extreme.

It’s what we want after all. We live for the extremes. Imagine the possibility, Mark McGwire’s record and Clinton’s impeachment in the same year.

So what happens if somebody hits 70 home runs next year, or President Gore checks out a flight attendant? Nobody will care.

Once we’ve been to the extremes we seem to be bored by everything in the middle.

Which is really too bad, because no matter how flashy we try to make it, most of our lives fall somewhere in the middle. I’d like to think there’s nothing wrong with that.

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Ben Godar is a junior in sociology from Ames.