Surviving "Survivor"?

To demonstrate my weirdness, I've never cared for "reality" shows. They're too staged, choreographed, and melodramatic, in other words perfect entertainment for a culture that prefers professional wrestling to reading. Any "show" that lets merit be determined by the votes of people with nothing better to do than redial says more about its viewers than about talent. Watching someone eat a plate of worms was fun when I was eight, and stranding folks in faraway lands when America is so, let's say, not popular right now may one day bring real reality to contestants that may not be pretty (but will top the Nielsens that week).

I know, I know. I'm an intellectual wannabe, an obvious jerk. "If people want to see it, if the market provides, if you don't like it, don't watch," yada, yada. In most ways, I even agree with that. I don't watch and I don't really care. But . . . .

We've just had a second "Survivor" winner get caught in real-life fraud. Chris Daugherty called in sick to his Ohio Department of Transportation job so he could make another $8000 on a Survivor tour of Europe. "I . . . I was suffering from depression . . . yeah, that's it," he says. Real quote: "I'm fighting it. I survived Vanuatu. I'll survive ODOT." Please. This comes on top of the first Survivor winner, Richard Hatch, being sent to for tax evasion ($1.4 m. worth), for over four years.

Clearly, the show did not cause their criminality. But it rewarded the same skills and mentalities that they displayed in the real world to the net effect of draining our tax dollars. Why? Because that's the kind of people they are and, on top of that, we watched and applauded them.

So here comes the tired old "what does this say about us?" lament? Well, no, not really. We know what it says about us and it's not good. It is just one more case of what an unserious, unreal people we are, a people also unworthy. Unworthy of the real world we were given by the people who built this nation and left us the biggest stock of seed corn any generation has ever been given. Which we are now eating like it will never go away. Maybe one day that stock will get to levels where we'll figuratively have to vote on who gets kicked off the island. And we already know who the winners will be. The American Legacy will be left to the Hatchs and Daughertys.

I wonder what kind of ratings that will draw.