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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial 06/22/01 note: for links to information resources, go to NewsBoom THE GANGSTA G.O.P. Why have we become such a nation of mean bastards? Easy. Welcome to conservative nirvana, the G.O.P. state of bliss where it's every man for himself and nothing else matters as long as I get mine. Doubt it? Then join me in a tour of mean-spirited-survival-of-the-fittest reality TV shows. There's Fear Factor, where people survive by sleeping with rats and climbing out of wrecked cars suspended several hundred feet in the air by a crane. There's Survivor, of course, the ultimate in counter-intuitive programming. We've been taught, from the Boy Scouts to the military, that the best way to survive is to co-operate and work as a team. Not in Tom DeLay nation, where you survive by double-crossing the other guy. All this started with Allan Funt and the andeleuvian Candid Camera. Funt's son, who now owns the trademark, says this is the sort of thing his father would have never put on the air. The idea, says Funt the Younger, was to laugh gently at the other person, not put them in danger and cackle at their squirming. Now, he says, we've become meaner and crueler as a society. Yuh-huh. Check out what the hip-hop suburban generation listens to as they cruise in their daddy's SUV, ball cap on backward, baggy pants at half-mast. It's rumbling rap about gangstas and ho's and dope and phat cars and money and flashy jewelry. Look at the hollow-eyed ghetto bangers actually living the thug life, swimming in a cultural sewer of fast money, get mine while I can, and f*** you motherf*****. Of course it affects the rest of the culture as well. Why? Because it sells. And the triumphs of individualism and the free markets are what everyone from the Gipper to Dick Armey have been preaching for decades. It's succeeded, all right. Private enterprise is making a bundle convincing your sons to walk the thug walk and your daughters to dress like hookers. Local TV news is drenched in gore and the bizarre. Local operations like WBBM in Chicago try staight news, no frills, no bloody corpses coverage, and their ratings fall into the tank. Stations like WSVN in Miami go with jiggly, sweat-soaked blood and guts coverage, and their viewership goes through the roof. Local radio is plastered with ads for quack weight loss and potency nostrums. The WWF rules the cable ratings universe. So what's it tell us? That as much as we whine about the cruel, selfish, rude, abrasive, and violent nature of modern society, we buy into it with open arms and wallets. Like the conservatives have been preaching for years, it's all about you and you individually, Mr. and Mrs. America. It's your tax break, even if it means slashing services. It's your own Social Security account, even if it means wrecking the system that's saved two generations of Americans from old age poverty. The selfishness of the free market has carried the way. And there's no more savvy free-marketeer than the gold-chained hip-hop impresario who's gloating over selling your kids a violent, trivial, boom-boxed vision of life. It's a pity we'll never see Armey or DeLay in ground-dragging prison-issue khakis and clanking jewelry, making spastic gangsta finger signs on the floor of the House. It fits them like a glove. Join the Discussion |
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