By Jim Israel, aka ‘Mr. Gripes’ mistergripes.com                     March 14, 2010

‘Bad Girls Club’….During his convalescence from ankle surgery, Mr. Gripes was compelled to recline, day after day, on the living-room sofa. Writing and, for that matter, reading were out of the question due to constant post-operative pain. Consequently, his main recreational activity devolved to observing day-time television. Yikes. If any of my readers has any doubts about the collapse of the American hegemony, take a week off and just watch cable. It’s become an overflowing sewage basin.

Let’s examine the American women’s liberation movement, for instance. It is in deep, deep trouble. Oh sure, those anxious upper-class mothers in Chappaqua, or Westport, or Orinda will move mountains to get their oh-so-gifted, over-privileged daughters into law schools, and self-anointed feminists, ecstatic that schools are graduating these days more female lawyers than male, envision the dawning of a matriarchal America. Sorry, ladies, it’s not to be: women’s liberation is now narrowly limited to one social stratum, the wealthy and powerful. Throw in college students wasting their time on a ridiculous major like Women’s Studies and that’s the extent of the women’s movement.

Mr. Gripes may appear a bit jaundiced, but I implode you to take a look at the cable reality show, ‘Bad Girls Club.’ A half-dozen young women, in their twenties, are selected to live together in a plush home in some warm southern city. These women do not resemble Susan B. Antony and her suffragettes on the picket lines in the least: they get drunk, they fight, even throwing punches and pulling hair, they form cliques, and they scheme against each other. And, good Lord, do they curse, constantly, with a complexity and fluidity not even a marine clamoring onto Omaha Beach could ever imagine. A backdrop to all this is an unremitting lusting for boys, boys, boys and sex, sex, sex. The damage to the movement is so obvious: every stereotypical feminine trait that women have spent decades insisting is belittling and false is nevertheless accentuated, even trumpeted, on the show.

And, here’s the factor that makes all this so depressing: your nine-, ten-, or 11-year-old daughter, at her most impressionable and innocent age, at home from school in the late afternoon, plops down in front of the television, and avidly watches this filth.  And, the effluvia keeps on coming down stream:  Mr. Gripes noticed the other day there’s a new show out: it’s called RuPaul’s Drag Race, and features some kind of competition between drag queens – imagine your daughter watching this train wreck. Feminism for the next generation is dead on arrival. That’s the way reality T.V. works: it takes fundamental core values and sensibilities, and eviscerates them, favoring always the most vile human behavior.

‘Fear and Loathing in the Heartland’…We all hear the identical refrain each election cycle: ‘There’s so much anger out there in the hinterlands….there’s a huge shake-up in Washington brewing… Incumbents are extremely nervous about November.’ Every two years, it’s always the same media line: revolution is upon us. But nothing changes. Yes, there’ll be a few more or less Democrats or Republicans in Congress, but fundamentally the system is stuck, paralyzed. There’ll be no big changes in November 2010. I’ll give you two reasons: first, Mr. Gripes admits there’s a lot of fear and disgust among the electorate; voters, though, almost to a man, while vehemently insisting ‘they’re all crooks and thieves down there in D.C.’, in the same sentence assert, ‘but our guy is a good guy, and I’m voting for him again.’ Americans are as slow, dumb and obstinate as donkeys, and virtually never vote their own man [or woman] out. In reality, only death, illness or scandal manages to dislodge any of these clowns.

Second reason: the system is rigged before any elections take place. In state capitols, whichever party controls the legislature passes gerrymandering laws that create in perpetuity safe seats for both parties – authentic bipartisanship is at work for once when incumbent Republicans and Democrats carve out no-contest districts, statewide and national,  in backroom deals with each other – Stalin’s Politburo in Moscow circa 1952 couldn’t have done a better job gaming the system.

We, the voters, have sustained this sham for a long, long time. Shame on us. But, there’s another ‘enabler’ afoot here: the media. Choosing to ignore completely any coverage of gerrymandered electoral districts, the media – TV and print – instead go along with the myth that a revolution is close at hand. They – political reporters – surely know better than Mr. Gripes that the rotten system never changes, but the idea that peasants in the countryside, armed with pitchforks, are marching into Paris, hell-bent on killing all the occupants of the palace, makes for a far more dramatic narrative than the rather forlorn and drab theme that our government apparatus is absolutely, undeniably broken beyond repair. Even those self-righteous popinjays, Matthews and Olbermann, should be ashamed of their negligence.

The Olympics, Without Tears…I know, I know, all you American jingoists out there, with the buttons popping off your Ralph Lauren dress shirts because you’re so proud that the good, old U.S.A. showed all those little pissant countries out there who’s still the boss. But, let’s just hold on for a minute.

Alas, it wasn’t a fair fight. The United States, despite all its troubles, still excels at one tremendous skill: using its money and clout to fix the system to its advantage. Oh, we’re so good at that. Isn’t that so, Wall Street?

So, let’s parse some elements of the past two weeks:

My readers surely have seen that rough schemata of a typical man’s brain: 50% of the cerebrum occupied by ‘sex’, 35% ‘money’, 20% ‘food.’ You know what I’m talking about, right? Well, if we did a similar ‘map’ of the countries NBC showcased on its telecast, 99.8% of Earth would be ‘U.S.A.,’ and 0.2% the rest of the world, an area no bigger than Mineola, New York. The jingoism was appalling. I  I posed this question after the last Olympics, too: why does a country, so rich, so powerful, so confident of its own democratic underpinnings, need to resort to a banana-republic cry for approval, and breast-thumping nationalism? Mr. Gripes cannot figure that out.

I’ve always been very suspicious of nationalism. It’s dangerous. It can unleash the mob. It causes wars, and enmity among peoples. In fact, by a matter of degrees, all that ‘U.S.A., U.S.A.’ chanting that went on in Vancouver is nothing but a variation of those 1930’s nighttime rallies in Nuremberg.

Besides, the ‘victory’ for America in amassing the most medals – and, boy, did this country obsess about them – was a hollow one. NBC, undoubtedly encouraged by this country, rigged the system. Paying $12 billion for the Olympics over the past 10 years gave the network a lot of clout. And, NBC sure used it. Case in point: NBC, looking at the whole panorama of the Winter Games, saw an opportunity: it needed more events to fill all those broadcast hours, and needed more American medals to juice ratings. Eureka! Snowboarding, mogul skiing, halfpipe, and aerials were added as medal events a decade ago. Come on, these competitions are akin to dancing bears at the carnival, essentially sideshows, and certainly not remotely related to an authentic sport like Nordic skiing, for example. What a country this is: the competitors in these events two or three years ago were eighth-grade drop-outs who spent their days running from truancy cops and skateboarding off of roofs into empty pools and onto tops of cars, scaring the crap out of the neighbors. Now, they’re lionized gold medal winners. Mind-boggling. NBC was undeterred: if the myopic Americans desperately want those medals, we’ll get ‘em. The system was scammed.

One final observation: NBC , technically brilliant with its telecasts [the cross-country coverage was uniformly fantastic, with virtually every race, ranging from 3 miles to 30 miles, decided in the last 50 yards], sometimes ran off the track in its reverence for itself.

The smug Matt Lauer: I turn the TV on the first day of competition, Saturday, hoping for perhaps a skier careening down a mountain at 80, 90 miles an hour. What do I see, instead? A replay of Mr. Lauer, Olympic torch in hand, clad in an all-white gym suit, trudging slowly – and I mean s_l_o_w_l_y — down a Vancouver highway. My God. He looked like a walking Tampon applicator. Afterwards, in that false modesty of his, he says he was “lucky” to have been chosen to carry the torch. Mr. Lauer, ‘luck’ had nothing to do with it. With those 12 billion bucks your network spent on the Games, if you wanted to ski-jump, somehow they’d find a spot for you on the American team.

A couple of hours later, I regretfully came across Lester Holt gamely, but very gingerly, stumbling down the ice, stone in hand, attempting to master the sport of curling. [An aside: why did NBC opt to televise about 10,000 hours of curling, a sport fully reminiscent of shuffleboard, the soporific game of choice my ancient, half-demented Jewish relatives played in Boca Raton long ago? I defy anyone to watch more than 10 minutes without nodding off.] Mr. Holt looked anxious, as if he were about to fall face-forward onto the hard, cold ice. An enlightening experience for viewers?  Not for a second. The only person enlightened was Mr. Holt, who probably knelt in front of a teleprompter afterwards, embracing the machine, and promising never again to desert it.

I have this one last piece of advice for the NBC big-shots: viewers are only interested in the great athletes and the competitions, and could care less about your millionaire, self- important reporters. That goes for all of them: the insufferable Tom Brokaw, the too-cutesy Meredith Viera, the stuffed-shirt Al Michaels, Al Roker and his run-amok ego, et al., should just shut up and go away for the two weeks.

An archive of some past columns appears on my website, mistergripes.com…

March 8, 2010