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My LTTE about reality TV and the lows we're approaching in Bush's America. What do you think? Any suggestions?
The Editor,
Metrowest Daily News
February 13, 2005
They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
For those too young to remember the 1969 movie starring Jane Fonda and Gig Young, let alone the Dance Marathons of the 30s, allow me to draw some comparisons to present times.
Reality TV shows routinely put people in competition for money or a prime job opportunity, by undergoing macabre “Fear” challenges, (Fear factor), survival strategies (The Survivor), or using business skills to win against another team, (The Apprentice , The Rebel Billionaire). While I have little problem with how much people are willing to humiliate themselves, or show themselves in the worst light possible, all in the name of ratings and hopefully winning, I am disturbed in the extreme by two of the latest ideas for reality shows.
The first is “The Contender” on NBC which pits various family men against each other in a boxing competition, the other is one slated to begin on ABC called the “Miracle Workers”, which consists of a team of doctors combing the country for people who are desperate for medical care for which they are uninsured or cannot afford.
Are we so desperate for entertainment that we would willingly watch men batter each other senseless in the desperate hope of gaining money for their families?
And are we so hardened as a nation that people in desperate need for medical care have to become sources of entertainment to the rest of us to get the care they need? How the rest of the civilized world must look at us in wonder and despair. The most powerful nation on the earth prefers bread and circuses to fixing the problems of poverty and health care for all.
So back to the Dance Marathons.
In the 1930s, before the New Deal of FDR, the untrammeled stock market governed the economy, and when the stock market collapsed in 1929, people in their millions were thrown out of work, farmers were thrown off their land, and President Hoover had no answer than to let the markets and the people find their own way out of the mess. People were reduced to begging on the streets, joining soup lines, whatever they could do to survive, and some unscrupulous “entrepreneurs” saw an opportunity. Have people take part in dance marathons where they would dance (or shuffle) around a dance floor for as long as it took for one couple to remain standing and become the winners. Other people paid for the “entertainment” of watching these exhausted human beings drag each other around. They had to dance constantly with a break of 15 minutes every hour for, for toilet breaks, naps, food, whatever, as long as one person could keep the other upright and moving for the other 45 minutes. Some people slept as they were moved around the dance floor. As an added refinement, and to prevent boredom in the spectators, every hour for a few minutes, the tempo of the music was dramatically increased and the contenders had to dance to the tempo or even run around the floor otherwise they were eliminated. No doubt this was a hoot for the spectators, after a week it must have been torture for the contenders, and remember, the longest dance marathon lasted 5,154 hours and 48 minutes for the grand prize of $2000.
Dance marathons were eventually banned, by the Blue Laws, of all things.
We now have a president hell bent on undoing all the social safety nets such as Medicaid, emergency health care for children, VA health benefits and Social Security, and who recently lauded as “uniquely American” a woman working three jobs to support her children, one of whom is mentally retarded.
I suppose he’d applaud Dance Marathons as uniquely American too.
Yours truly,
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