| These guardians of the
pure are certain that Hollywood has coarsened out society.
I am inclined to agree with them about the overall quality
of network television, though their preferred responses
scare me silly. But I am worried about a completely
different danger oozing from today’s prime time
programming, an evil far more perverse than Janet Jackson’s
nipple or Bono’s profanity. I worry because we
hear virtually nothing about it, and because the change
is so felicitous to our moral and economic masters.
America is utterly enthralled with what is perhaps
the most ironically misnamed product ever unleashed
on the opiated American public: “reality”
TV. Millions of people watch nightly as ordinary schmoes
(many of whom are actors, but never mind) are plucked
from their lives of quiet mediocrity and given a shot
at fame and fortune. America’s Next Top Model
and American Idol pluck the talented (assuming, as TV-land
does, that physical beauty is a form of talent) from
obscurity and launch careers. (The circular absurdity
of being famous for being famous, and how that turns
into a career, are hereby reserved for another time.)
Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, The Bachelor and their
ilk reward the shallow and shameless with money and
their requisite 15 minutes. (Few today recall that the
original definition of “geek” was a talentless
carnival performer so defeated by life that he would
bite the heads from live chickens for money. Think of
that next time you watch “Survivor.”)
We know why Hollywood foists such drivel on its target
audience. The shows are cheap to produce. And said audience
watches. But why? Why do millions of Americans chose
to medicate with such staged, hokey, meaningless excrescence?
I believe the primary reason Joe Sixpack watches is
that he thereby vicariously lives his own fantasies
of emerging as a butterfly from the chrysalis of his
own glamourless life. Where past generations understood
that such transformation required hard work (or, as
in the case of slackers like our President, considerable
skill in the choosing of one’s parents), today’s
Americans are bombarded with evidence that the media
deux ex machina can obviate the need for such
inconvenience.
This new, passive myth has filled the vacuum left by
the death of the old: the Horatio Alger story. Americans
have always believed, in a way Europeans have not, in
class mobility. The world’s tired, poor, huddled
masses head for Lady Liberty, work hard, and rise into
the middle class or even higher. As a result, America
has thought itself to be a less class-based society,
and its social policies have done less to favor the
poor than those of most European nations. In the American
mythos, poverty was largely a consequence of personal
failure.
If that myth was ever based in fact, the reality is
now clearly otherwise. Indeed, the myth of actual class
mobility was interred by no less than the Wall Street
Journal, arguably one of the holiest books of the capitalist
religion, in a page one story on May 13th.
"Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. remains
a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists
say that in recent decades the typical child starting
out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada)
has had a better chance at prosperity," the Journal
noted. The WSJ also noted that a recent study (by a
Federal Reserve economist, no less) showed that, "Only
14% of men born to fathers on the bottom 10% of the
wage ladder made it to the top 30%. Only 17% of the
men born to fathers on the top 10% fell to the bottom
30%."
If science has debunked such a bedrock myth, one of
two things would seem to follow: either the disadvantaged
in our society will wake up, and act (and vote) based
on a more realistic view of the world, or a new sustaining
myth will be propagated in order to keep hoi polloi
sedated.
A more perfect role for television is difficult to
imagine.
And so a populace trained by its religion to believe
in miracles, magic and divine intervention has welcomed
the morphing of the Horatio Alger story into something
far more injurious to society: rather than look to their
own efforts and resources to better their lives, the
proles hope against passive hope that they will be chosen
to play the television lottery that transforms ugly
ducklings into swans, poor into rich, and obscure into
famous. The result is arguably more effective in inoculating
Joe Sixpack against economic class consciousness than
a lifetime of hypocritical scoldings from Pat Robertson
and James Dobson could ever be.
The hallmark of this new crop of gentry-in-waiting
is an unprecedented dissociation of preferences from
realistic self-interest. To an unprecedented degree,
these tele-sheep tend to favor not the interests of
the economic class to which they really belong (and
which the odds are overwhelmingly that they will never
leave), but the interests of the class living in the
style to which they expect to become accustomed. The
world thus no longer consists of rich and poor: there
is a third category, which should perhaps be known as
the “rich-any-day-now.” Robin Leach (was
there ever a man so perfectly named?) will be leading
a camera crew through their mansions next year, or the
year after that at the latest. It should surprise no
one that millions choose that fantasy rather than face
the ugly reality – that George Bush will never
have a beer with them; that they will never review their
head shots with Tyra Banks, and that Donald Trump will
never fire them – at least not on prime time.
This neutralization of class consciousness has been
the religious right’s greatest achievement. Convincing
ordinary folks that gay marriage, activist judges and
the like are greater threats than their own economic
distress is a virtually unprecedented feat. It has allowed
the constellation of Christian churches to create a
civil religion full of bombast and devoid of charity—a
God-blessed dystopia where the meek inherit nothing
but debt, and the actual rich reap the manna that flows
from the rich-any-day-now’s myopia.
There was a popular saying a decade or so ago—“I’ve
abandoned my search for truth and will settle for a
good fantasy.” Hollywood, with the obvious blessing
of the parallel elite in Washington, has made that self-defeating
escapism into its central dogma.
Where is the harm in the champagne dreams of our Budweiser
nation? It is the same harm that built the casinos on
the Las Vegas strip, that monument to mankind’s
folly. It is the same harm that puts future organ donors
on motorcycles without helmets. It is these, but worse,
because the collateral damage from your belief that
this time you will be lucky at keno is minimal. The
shrapnel from lower class America’s identification
with the upper class is the angry renunciation of the
social contract by those who need it most.
And so poor and middle class Americans support tax
cuts for the wealthy, because deep down they just know,
against all odds, that any day now they are going to
be rich, too. Of course the real reality is
that they are as statistically likely to become America’s
Next Top Gigolo as I am to win the Tour de France, but
they willingly choose to in effect play a lottery in
which 99% of the winners are known before a ticket is
bought.
John
Steinberg bloviates regularly @ www.bluememe.blogspot.com.
|
