As a child in the 1970s, I was not paying attention to politics, so formed no personal opinion of his tenure as a politician.

For most people of my generation, Springer came to prominence as a talk show host around the time that the serious talk show popularity had peaked and networks went down the path to lowbrow sensationalism - in this vein, no one scraped the bottom of the barrel lower than Gerald Norman "Jerry" Springer.

Like many shows of the late 80s and early 90s, this ilk didn't necessarily change TV, but tapped into the change that was bubbling under the facade of civility, a dumbing down, a dispensing with airs and pretense. There was no etiquette, no more facade. In the early 80s, I still thought wrestling was real, and the debates that conceded to the sad realization that it was staged, fake, for entertainment's sake, befell the talk shows that were once dominated by the serious efforts of Phil Donahue.

In the 70s, sitcoms lead by All in the Family were serious, discussed politics, had us laughing as we looked at real issues. By the early 80s, the family sitcoms of The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Growing Pains, was a landscape of hugging and learning. By the late 80s, Married...with Children and The Simpsons dismissed all those wholesome family values as normative to laugh at dysfunction and ignorance and ensure that there's more to normal than what we'd seen previously. By the early 90s, Seinfeld came along and drove a "no hugging, no learning" stake through the heart of values TV.

Which brings us back to Springer, who danced on the grave of normal, and rose up an onslaught of the gaudy, the garish, and the grotesque, to titillate, shock, and keep us chanting "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" with each reveal, slap, chair-tossing brawl, as we marched inexorably towards the world we live in today wherein truth is oft stranger than fiction, and I can't help longing, just a little, for a time when fiction was still stranger than truth.

RIP.