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On talk shows, people go onstage and talk about a friend or family member and how self-destructive or freakish their
behavior is, supposedly to help this person improve themselves, but most likely as a means of displaying their loved one up
in a giant bell-jar for 80 million people to gawk at. It's usually a "teen gone wild" or someone with a bizarre habit, say,
a mother gets up and says "My teen daughter is a stripper and I can't get her to stop" or a kid says "My wife is black and
my brother won't accept her because he's a Nazi skinhead" or whatever. But it's always someone close to the person, someone
who knows them well and is expressing a desire that they alter their behavior.
And then the freaks themselves come onstage to give an account of themselves. They are always unrepentant, unapologetic,
and completely unwilling to change. The audience, of course, is anxious to help this person see the error of their ways, and
their concern usually translates into shouting, and most commonly words like "whore" are bandied about. The freak then, without
fail, shouts back at the audience something like "Shut up! You don't know me!" It's always "...you don't know me!" Always.
The implication is obviously that, since the folks in the audience don't know the freak onstage...I mean, really know
them, their hopes and fears and dreams, what kind of inner child inhabits his or her soul...then they have no right to make
any value judgements on their self-destructive behavior. I guess there's a lot of truth in that: No one wants a total stranger
calling them a dumb ass. Or thinking that it's that obvious. People think that strangers don't understand how or why they're
doing whatever they're doing, and there are always circumstances to explain their actions.
None of that explains why the mothers and cousins are there, though. They do know the freaks. When they speak
up, the freaks just tell them to shut up, or else they start accusing them of even worse things. And then it becomes, in simplest
terms, a moral debate.
It's really fascinating, from a sociological and anthropological point of view. It's like watching two fleas argue over
which one of them is taller.
Everyone talks about rights these days, which is fine I reckon, except that everyone seems to assume that because they
have a right to do something that that necessarily makes it the right thing to do. They say "You can't legislate morality"
and then assume that that means there is no such thing as morality.
But off the top of my head, I could list a hundred things that I may have every right to do but are still extraordinarily
bad ideas, or just really really stupid. It might not be against the law for me to audition for the Chippendale dancers, or
bathe in Clorox, or drill a hole in my skull, but that doesn't make them good ideas.
I know I'm reading too much into these talk shows, because surely none of the guests are thinking of morality, sociology,
anthropology, or where to draw the line between personal freedoms and societal obligations. I can also say with relative certainty
that none of these issues are of immediate concern to any of the show's producers, hosts, or 80 million home viewers. They're
just putting on a freak show.
I know I'm going to be called unpatriotic for this, but in a way talk shows are kind of like Congress. The issues are
different, of course, and so is the dress code, but basically I see the same things going on.
OK, you present an issue, whatever it is: On talk shows it would be something like Bisexual Teenage Paternity Test Makeovers,
and in Congress it would be something you didn't understand and wouldn't care about if you did understand, like deregulation
of privately-held capital derived from low-yield five-year t-bills. Then you have a debate, and everyone gets pissed off.
You hear a lot of Southern accents. And finally, in the end, everyone goes home, and nothing is resolved.
The main difference would be the host, I guess. Congress has no host, no one to kind of keep things on track. I guess
the Senate has the Vice-President, except that 1) He's hardly ever there, and 2) When he is there he hardly ever speaks. So
he's kind of the opposite of a talk show host.
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