Aja was crying. "There's nothing worse than having someone critique your body and your face,"she wept as the camera zoomed in to track her tears the way NASA tracks footprints on the moon.

It was so sad.

Just a few minutes before she was strutting around on stage in a string bikini the size of a baby's socks. But as the hungry TV cameras moved in, she began to tremble where she was supposed to jiggle. Something about standing nearly naked in front of millions of ogling eyeballs made her nervous.

`Look at that tongue'

The celebrity judges swooped in like a pack of chicken-killing dogs, quickly reducing poor Aja to a humiliated emotional wreck who is likely to go home with permanent psychological scars and a lifelong claim to synthetic fame: "I was on Are You Hot?"

ABC calls it "The Search For America's Sexiest People."

But I think it is actually a terrorist training film. It's just the kind of thing Osama would show to his fanatic F-Troops to prove America is decadent, warped and evil.

And here's the funny part. This cultural pollution was brought to you by the same Hollyweird "activists" who seem to lie awake at night worrying what other countries think of America.

If Islamic fundamental-cases really hate us for exporting garbage like this, I can't really blame them. I just wish they would sort it out with the people who peddle it and leave the rest of us alone.

But back to the show. The Hollywood clothes designer is telling some stricken young woman, "Your chest is very small," as her glued-on smile fades several shades to a painful grimace.

The judge who looks like Kato Kaelin at the O.J. trial, but doesn't sound as bright, is rating the women with his own biological measuring device, so to speak.

Another woman gets a detailed, critical analysis of her "ahss" from a British "super model." (Just what are super models, anyway? Can they fly? Are they afraid of green kryptonite? I hope so.)

"Great butt" the celebrity judges say. "Look at that tongue."

Ivy, who has no back on her bikini bottom, scores big. Surprise.

`Woooo, woooo'

Young men, who put more time in a gym than Dr. Albert Sabin spent finding a vaccine for polio, flex their cartoonish biceps and the women in the audience go "Woooooo, woooooo" like monkeys you hear in the jungle in Tarzan movies.

Each contestant is judged on body, face and overall sex appeal.

The judges take a glance at one grinning cabana boy and decide he is "a charming, regular, nice guy." For all they know, he's a tower-shooter who jumps curbs to run over cats and dogs. But what the heck, it's all just skin deep.

Even the ads make it clear that nothing else matters. All they show is torsos and crotches.

In the Limbo dance to see how low our culture can slither, ABC gets first prize for Are You Hot?

It's like a slave market for Hollywood, where "reality TV" is an oxymoron.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.