Jon and Kate Plus Hate
Okay. Maybe it’s not an indication of the imminent demise of Western Civilization. But like Oprah, Real Housewives, American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Hell’s Kitchen, Survivor, Real World, and any other of the myriad “reality” TV programs through which we obtain surrogate alternatives to getting a life, our voyeuristic fascination with Jon and Kate Plus Eight teeters on the scale between perversion and obscenity. If our ratings-boom fascination with the lunacy-inducing fame of these two self-absorbed nitwit parents of twins and sextuplets is not the end of something, it’s the beginning of the end, and I don’t mean their marriage.
Do we think about this at all? We’ve made big business out of television programming that panders to the notion that we can feel better about ourselves — or at least distract ourselves from thinking about ourselves — by watching people who almost certainly turn out to be more maladjusted than we are, in some way or other. We can judge, goof, laugh, disdain, and celebrate our superiority over the poor saps. To what constructive end? After Jon got his free hair-replacement treatments – and as we watch him struggle to cope with eight children, without a wife, in the $1.1 million home he’ll now be co-opting with his soon-to-be-ex, and trying to figure out what’s left in it for him – what will we have accomplished? After Kate got her free tummy-tuck and boob-job – and as we watch her struggle to cope with eight children, without a husband, in the same home, trying to also figure out how to share notoriety with her ex-husband and still get all of the attention to which we’ve now taught her she’s entitled – how will we have bettered ourselves?
And if we’re tempted to feel any kind of faux sympathy for these narcissistic nincompoops, let’s save it, shall we? There are eight other people – perilously young and vulnerable – in the midst of this mess, who’ll need the real thing. They’ll need all the support, counseling, and balance they can find, along with all of the patience and forgiveness they can muster for their celebrity-seduced parents. Chances are they’ll become latter-day Danny Bonaduces: bundles of hostile energy without direction or senses of self, wreaking havoc on a world that wrung them out, exploited their innocence, and left them to fend for themselves in lives suddenly bereft of unsolicited popular adulation. Respect? Earn it? Huh?
I have a recurring dream, in which I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s in Richmond with Thomas Jefferson. He’s been tabbed by Congress to write a proposal for declaring the colonies’ independence from Britain. He’s been appointed to a committee that includes John Adams, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Bob Livingston. But Ben took sick, and the rest have golf dates. So, Tom has to draft the thing himself. He’s okay with that, since he fancies himself a writer and the rest of the group a bunch of hacks. But one thing’s bugging him. He’s cribbed a line from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason. It says this:
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Tom’s version says this:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Since he’s gotten the notion from somewhere that brevity is the soul of wit, he likes his version better because it’s shorter; although, he isn’t sure it’s all that witty. What chafes him is whether he should offer a tighter definition of the pursuit of Happiness. I tell him it’s a matter of timing: if he kicks the bucket before television is invented, it won’t be his problem. Tom says, “Say what?” I tell him never mind, pick up the tab for the coffee, and send him an invoice for my consulting services.
That dream leaves me with the notion that we might get better senses of ourselves – and perhaps pursue a tad more happiness – if we limited our television-watching to C-SPAN. But those senses of self are likely to be scarier because they’re weaker in the face of reality, as opposed to celebrity – and they might make us contemplate the necessity of doing something, as opposed to the luxury of doing nothing.
Hey! What time does The Bachelorette come on?