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http://www.concordmonitor.com/Reality-television-Donald-Trump-society-in-decline-2510835
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| Composite photo of raptor from Squam Lake and a stump from Boscawen Town Forest CC Jean Stiimell |
What’s really
real?
The dawn of our
new century marked the debut of Survivor, TV’s first reality show. It seemed like an innocent, isolated germ of
an event but, since then, the genre has exploded to the point it has infected
vital organs of society, threatening our democratic way of life, or what is
left of it. If you think this is just my own paranoid, frothing of the mouth, I
have good company.
Actor and
filmmaker Gary Oldman describes reality television as “the museum of social
decay, while esteemed journalist Ted Koppel worries that reality TV marks “the
end of civilization.” Reality TV destabilizes by sleight-of-hand, switching
reality with fiction.
Good fiction,
although by definition “make-believe”, can connect us to deeper values and
higher truths about what it is to be human. Reality TV, however, which purports
to be nonfiction does the opposite: their producers use deceptive or even
fraudulent practices such as misleading editing, coaching participants on how
to behave, or staging scenes for the cameras and then pass off the result as an
unscripted, straight-forward event.
Another criticism of reality TV is
that the genre is intended to humiliate or exploit participants, make
celebrities out of untalented people who do not deserve fame, and glamorize
vulgarity and materialism.
I know where you think I am going
with this. Much of what I have written sounds like I am describing Donald
Trump. And, in a way, I am because reality TV and Donald Trump are jointed at
the hip.
Out of the multitude of reality shows
the networks have thrown at us, The Apprentice is one of the longest
lasting and most popular – and, of course, totally identified with Donald
Trump! He has hosted this reality game show that judges the business skills of
a group of contestant from its inception in 2004 until 2015.
Yes, Trump has been there since the
beginning: instrumental in perfecting the genre and now making himself
synonymous with it by making the 2016 Republican Presidential nominating
process into this own reality show.
Media outlets are overjoyed because,
due to stiff competition from the internet, reality TV is one of their last big
profit makers. Trump has accurately commented on why the networks are groveling
to give him free air time, explaining that
when “I go on one of [their]
shows the ratings double, they triple!”
In essence, Trump has created the
first political reality show starring himself with the blessing of big media
who, in turn, are making a killing.
Actually, it is worse than that: the big three networks are, in a real
sense, the instigators and prime movers for what has happened.
Way back in 1987, Ken Auletta wrote a
book, “Three Blind Mice” about how the TV networks lost their way by
successfully lobbying to undo public trust restrictions that ensured the
integrity of news broadcasting. He warned that as a consequence a “new video
democracy” would emerge where viewers would vote with their clickers for style
over substance, entertainment over news.
As he predicted, ratings have
increasingly influenced news content, culminating this year with the coronation
of Trump, a triumph for the infotainment industry and its reality show
mentality.
What can be done to reverse this
trend?
The short answer is a resurgence of
grass roots democracy and our commitment to buy and act locally. The only thing
that is really real is the particulars of our own lives, enmeshed as
they are in our families and community. Yes, reality shows on TV purport to
deal with the particular, but because they are staged and scripted, they
eliminate the real existential choices that are the essence of what it means to
be human.
For a real life reality story close
to home, I am reminded of Geraldine Largay, the 66 year-old nurse whose body
was recently found just over the border in Maine. She was hiking the Appalachian
Trail two years ago when she became lost in impenetrable undergrowth after
leaving the trail for a bathroom break. She tried her best but could not find
the trail; her cellphone didn’t work; she lit fires to attract attention, she
tried everything she could think of. Nothing worked. 23 long days later, she
died of starvation.
Remarkably, rather than frantically
raging against her fate, she went gentle into that good night showing
remarkable courage and grace. Here’s her final, heartbreaking entry in her
notebook, moss-covered by the time it was found:
“When you find my body, please call
my husband George and my daughter Kerry. It will be the greatest kindness for
them to know that I am dead and where you found me – no matter how many years
from now.”
We don’t need to waste our time on
make-believe reality stories on TV – or make-believe political candidates –
when right here near-to-home, we are awash in stories, real stories that affect
our lives. Best yet, often times, we can
play an active part in determining how these stories develop and how they end. And
that’s just what we need: democracy from the ground up!
Wendell Berry tells us that our main
job today is to learn to distinguish between local life and the abstractions
that we have allowed to obscure it. He says the chief instrument of economic
and political power has become commodified speech that can’t distinguish
general from particular, or false from true: “Local life is now a wren’s egg
brooded by an eagle or a buzzard.”
Isn’t it time to kick this abstract apparition – predator
or vulture, whatever you care to call it – out of our nest and relearn how to
brood our own eggs.
xxx
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