Stay Tuned for Tragedy!

    When we were first tasked with creating a blog in class, I was not quite sure what I would write for my first post: something more topical, or something that I was more passionate about (the two were mutually exclusive with the kinds of ideas I had at the time). In the wake of Hurricane Irene, I tossed around the idea of writing a post about America's obsession with tragedy, an issue that became apparent when outlets like the Weather Channel released their ratings from their coverage of the big storm. As it turns out, Americans have a strange fascination with watching disasters happen and seeing just how disastrous they can be (spoiler: they can be pretty disastrous). What, for many people, was a life-threatening tempest was, for millions of viewers, an epic, real-life drama. I ultimately decided to scrap the Irene post, though, and never found a good time or reason to go back to it.
    That is, until I started reading White Noise. The book explores, to a great extent, the relationship Americans have with mass media, including commentary on our obsession with death. Clearly, we love to witness destruction, whether it is in the form of a Weather Channel reporter being knocked to his feet by a gust of wind or an unmistakably horrific car crash on the side of the road that you just can't help but gawk at when you drive past. We've all been there, why can't we look away?
    Well, according to professor Emily Godbey, we've been gawking since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In an article on AlterNet called "Appetite for Destruction: Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Disaster?" Godbey claims that after the spread of industrialism gave birth to a working class all with very similar, mundane lives (the "flattening of experience" that O'Connor discussed in class earlier this week), "the unexpected, no matter what it is, brings a certain kind of excitement to people's lives." Yet this explanation does not fully explain why people, Americans especially, choose tragedy, disaster and destruction to satisfy this need for excitment. To this, Godbey argues that "it's a safe way to get a thrill. We're able to confront a common underlying fear - the fear of dying - without having to live through it ourselves." In the same way that DeLillo's Jack Gladney faces death by immersing himself in the study of the world's greatest villain and murderer, Adolf Hitler, many Americans tune into the Weather Channel each year to study the next great killer hurricane.
    This love of death and danger is apparent in the television shows we love to watch as well, many of which were analyzed as part of our TV Tokenism project. Shows like 24, a wildly popular drama focused on a man who kills people who try to kill lots of people, is built upon the premise that the entire world is in imminent danger and bathed in an atmosphere of looming death. Even in fiction TV entertainment, people have shown that they prefer a sense of danger over comfort. The new film Act of Valor (starring active duty Navy SEALs!), too, depicts a world on the brink of total nuclear apocalypse to provide its thrills. If nothing else, it's definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon that devastation and destruction become topics which, when depicted with enough dramatic flair, bring us so much joy.
    What do you think? Is it a dangerous habit to derive joy and entertainment from tragedy? How do these cultural preferences affect us as a society and as a country?
    For now, I'll leave you with this. It is a six-minute video entitled "Nascar Crashes Compilation." Pay close attention to the music as well as the visuals, though I really hope you do not find it so entertaining as to watch all six minutes. While watching, try to keep in mind that there is a person inside each one of those cars.

TV Tokenism: Community

The show I chose to analyze is Community. It runs on NBC Thursdays at 8:00 PM. It is in its third season, but is currently on hiatus. In 2009, Community was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

    Community is a sitcom which has a relatively diverse cast for a Network TV show (and also relatively low ratings for a network TV show); the main cast consists of two black characters, one asian character, one muslim polish-palestinian character and four white characters, one of whom is Jewish. The young white woman on the far right was going to be cast as a latina or asian woman, which would have made the cast predominantly nonwhite, but the producers could not find anyone to fit the role. In my opinion, Community does not adhere to Mr. Bolos' thesis regarding TV tokenism, yet still exhibits racism in perpetuating racial stereotypes (mainly between the white and black characters and perhaps for satirical purposes).
    The main character, an attractive, disheveled white man, is shown front and center right next to his blonde, white love interest and to the left of his other white love interest (in the show, this character only dates white women). Upfront next to him is the token "mystic minority," a black mother who is portrayed as severely religious. The other black character is simply a dumb jock with the behavioral patterns and mental capacity of a ten year-old, given the same kind of brutishness as is seen portrayed in Spike Lee's Bamboozled. Of course, this blatant stereotype is pushed to the back of the photo. It is also worth noting that all of the white characters on the show are relatively rich, the old white character played by Chevy Chase is unabashedly racist and the young white female character in the center  is forcedly and uncomfortably politically correct (see: racist).
At the same time, though, each main character in the cast is equally complex and fleshed-out, with no one character being morally or behaviorally one-dimensional. In addition, the two best-dressed characters are arguably the two white male characters, and only because their socioeconomic statuses in the context of the show demands it. This is, in my opinion, the perfect evidence for the show's lack of tokenism and perpetuation of stereotypes- after all, why do the white characters have to be so much richer than the minority characters?
    The thing I found most interesting about this picture, though, is how it is literally split down the middle between the white cast members and the minority cast members, yet the white cast members take up markedly more space (notice how the main character is leaning into the middle of the frame and Chevy Chase is towering over the black character to his right).

The Price of Power

    After our recent class discussion regarding political campaigns and, more specifically, super PACs, I left with the feeling that our country's democracy favors the rich far more than it should. I was particularly appalled to hear that Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary election after a flood of donations to the super PAC that was supporting his campaign. This was the first proof I had heard of a direct correlation between the amount of money thrown at a political campaign and its success, and that just didn't sit right with me. Surely, in a nation where anyone can become president regardless of their social or economic background, the better candidate should triumph over the wealthier, worse candidate, right?
    Then I noticed this picture (shown above) on the cover of a January edition of the Chicago Reader and I realized the true extent to which America's capitalist ideals have permeated our political system.
    The focal point of the picture is the sign being held up by a patriotic pumpkin person which reads "Need $$$ to buy a Congressman," followed by the words "Please Help!" I felt that this really mirrored the sentiments expressed during our class discussion, especially the idea that political power is bought rather than earned in this country (at least earned separately from a paycheck). The poor pumpkin-faced figure feels that the only way to have his voice heard in our democracy is to pay a congressman to speak for him, similar to how many ultra-rich businessmen and politicians contribute millions of dollars to super PACs in order to have their ideas present in Washington or to put a candidate whom they believe in into the White House.
    The idea that those with the most money in this country have the most influence over our political landscape is a scary thing, especially when you consider the implications of such a power structure on the rest of the nation, the people without enough money to compete in a race where wealth wins votes. In such a race, the "99%" characterized by the Occupy Movement wouldn't really have any say at all in the direction of our government and our democracy would no longer be a democracy but a plutocracy (yes, I looked up "plutocracy" on Wikipedia). In such a race, the relatively poor senator Barack Obama, a man from remarkably humble beginnings, would have had no chance of winning presidency over the far richer senator John McCain. To me, this is not at all what America stands for, though I am fascinated by how our capitalistic democracy has produced something so wholly un-democratic.
    But what can we do? How did our country get to this point? These are the questions that were brought to my mind while writing this post and I hope that you have some thoughts on them after reading it. If you do, please feel free to leave a comment below.