Boy, is this ever right! I have to contend with the results of watching this dreck in my classes on law and courts all the time and, believe me, it ain't easy. The kicker to the analysis is that people who watch these shows the most religiously (and I chose that adjective carefully) are the children the just-a-little-ahead-of-the-working-poor-shown-on-the-shows families. They can really "relate" to the screw-ups who make it on stage in these travesties.
The problem is just what this post pinpoints, but is even more incidious. It isn't the middle and upper class kids who buy the premises of these shows; they've been innoculated by an elite culture that still has a bit of noblesse oblige left in it. It isn't the working poor; they know people like the ones Springer et al. exploit and they know why these folks are having problems. No, the ones who buy into the basic idea that the poor are unworthy of a public role are the very people who are a generation or less away from them. And for them, of course, it's a matter of "human nature" or "bad life choices", never, never the life traps we have so subtly constructed for the poor suckers they laugh at on the court shows.
Now that I've started thinking about this, maybe I'll start something serious. Later, that is.
- Tracy Lightcap
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