Reality TV: Whose Reality is This?

Every sneer that can be cast at celebrity culture has already been sneered, but the Cassandrist thinks the dangers of a national ethic that exalts the talent-free to high status deserves more than disdain. It needs to be pummeled.

 

Celebrities are just like you and me, but more so, right?

 

As New Fascism preps the culture for the advent of Old Fascism and the elimination of individual rights and diversity, every citizen needs to be assured he or she is special. Fame is an entitlement, not the product of effort and ability. If you are not famous or rich or beautiful, it is someone else’s fault. Blame them. Elect politicians who promise you that you will be given what is due you. Crack another PBR in the trailer park and bitch about them folks makming your life a living hell.

 

Look at alleged “reality” TV. Here’s a spectacle that exalts the ordinary and mocks failure.

There are no complicated dramatic questions; no competing claims to virtue based on a scripted plot. On cheap-to-produce reality TV, ordinary people are put into games and competitions. These folks want their houses remade, to pursue a spouse, to survive on an island, to race around the world with their families, to plot against competitors, are to have dieticians and personal trainers, to throw themselves into vats of mud and vermin. Ordinary folks, just like you and me.

 

TV producers want folks that will exhibit the worst in human nature, not the best. Saints just don’t draw an audience and human frailty panders to an audience that needs to feel superior. The voyeurs out there mock weaknesses and willingness to endure humiliation, while assuring themselves that had they been fortunate enough to have been chosen to appear on a show that calls for no talent, they’d do far better. Gimme another PBR while I explain. Look, any jerk can see how it is done. You grab the rope here, you push off from there, you tell her this, and you deny that. Lie if you have to. Boy, those people on TV are stupid! Thanks, maybe one more PBR. I’d get up to get it, but I think I pissed my pants…

 

The Cassandrist notes for simpletons in the audience that these “real” people have been screened by programming personnel for the qualities that build audience. Depending on the TV game, those qualities may or may not include geniality, beauty, strength, ability, and perhaps a streak of meanness.

Why is This Entertainment?

 

In his darkest moment, the Cassandrist does not doubt that the votes of judges in the final stages of elimination on American Idol are determined by Nielsen, and the on-stage stooge judges are instructed to vote for the “talent” most likely to bring the audience back a week later.  For the TiVo Generation enchanted by the 21st century update of the radio show, Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, American Idol needs plenty of contestant fodder who are delusional about their abilities, probably feeble-minded, as well as a cast of judges that can be snide and bitchy, like Caesar at the Coliseum able to cast a thumbs-up or thumbs-down and grant life or death. The audience loves those judges, so like themselves, sp powerful, so knowledgeable, so arbitrary.

 

Genuine accomplishment can be achieved by real people. This week, we are watching Olympic athletes. Every performance we see is the product of years of dedication, hard work, arising at ungodly early hours, sweat, discipline, and an obsessive pursuit at excellence. These athletes accept responsibility for the self—they know that a lucky break is the consequence of diligence.

 

But in the New Fascist state of mind, that reality is unacceptable. In the New Fascism, or failures are always some other power’s fault.

 

 

— The Cassandrist

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