Step Across This Line (43 page)

JUNE 2001: REALITY TV

I’ve managed to miss out on reality TV until now. In spite of all the talk in Britain about nasty Nick and flighty Mel or, in America, about the fat, naked bastard Richard manipulating his way to desert-island victory, I have somehow preserved my purity. I wouldn’t recognize Nick or Mel if I passed them in the street, or Richard if he were standing in front of me unclothed.

Ask me where the
Big Brother
house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, and I have no answer. I do remember the American
Survivor
contestant who managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers looked like burst sausages, but that’s because he got onto the main evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares?

The subject of reality-TV shows, however, has been impossible to avoid. Their success is the media story of the (new) century, along with the ratings triumph of the big-money game shows like
Millionaire.
Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves, or ought to.

And what tawdry narcissism is here revealed! The television set, once so idealistically thought of as our window on the world, has become a dime-store mirror instead. Who needs images of the world’s rich otherness when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself—these half-attractive half-persons—enacting ordinary life under weird conditions? Who needs talent when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?

I’ve been watching [the British]
Big Brother 2,
which has achieved the improbable feat of taking over the tabloid front pages in the final stages of a general election campaign. This, according to the conventional wisdom, is because the show is more interesting than the election. The “reality” may be even stranger. It may be that
Big Brother
is so popular because it’s even more boring than the election. Because it is the most boring, and therefore most “normal,” way of becoming famous and, if you’re lucky or smart, of getting rich as well.

“Famous” and “rich” are now the two most important concepts in Western society, and ethical questions are simply obliterated by the potency of their appeal. To be famous and rich, it’s okay—it’s actually “good”—to be devious. It’s “good” to be exhibitionistic. It’s “good” to be bad. And what dulls the moral edge is boredom. It’s impossible to maintain a sense of outrage about people being so trivially self-serving for so long.

Oh, the dullness! Here are people becoming famous for being asleep, for keeping a fire alight, for letting a fire go out, for videotaping their clichéd thoughts, for flashing their breasts, for lounging around, for quarreling, for bitching, for being unpopular, and (this is too interesting to happen often) for kissing! Here, in short, are people becoming famous for doing nothing much at all, but doing it where everyone can see.

Add the contestants’ exhibitionism to the viewers’ voyeurism and you get a picture of a society sickly in thrall to what Saul Bellow called “event glamour.” Such is the glamour of these banal but brilliantly spotlit events that anything resembling a real value—modesty, decency, intelligence, humor, selflessness, you can write your own list—is rendered redundant. In this inverted ethical universe, worse is better. The show presents “reality” as a prizefight, and suggests that in life, as on TV, anything goes, and the more deliciously contemptible it is, the more we’ll like it. Winning isn’t everything, as Charlie Brown once said, but losing isn’t anything.

The problem with this kind of engineered realism is that, like all fads, it’s likely to have a short shelf-life, unless it finds ways of renewing itself. The probability is that our voyeurism will become more demanding. It won’t be enough to watch people being catty, or weeping when evicted from the house of hell, or “revealing everything” on subsequent talk shows, as if they had anything left to reveal.

What is gradually being reinvented is the gladiatorial combat. The TV set is the Colosseum, and the contestants are both gladiators and lions; their job is to eat one another until only one remains alive. But how long, in our jaded culture, before “real” lions, actual dangers, are introduced to these various forms of fantasy island, to feed our hunger for more action, more pain, more vicarious thrills? Here’s a thought, prompted by the news that the redoubtable Gore Vidal has agreed to witness the execution by lethal injection of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The witnesses at an execution watch the macabre proceedings through a glass window: a screen. This, too, is a kind of reality TV, and—to make a modest proposal—it may represent the future of such programs. If we are willing to watch people stab one another in the back, might we not also be willing actually to watch them die?

In the world outside TV, our numbed senses already require increasing doses of titillation. One murder is barely enough; only the mass murderers make the front pages. You have to blow up a building full of people or machine-gun a whole royal family to get our attention. Soon, perhaps, you’ll have to kill off a whole species of wildlife or unleash a virus that wipes out people by the thousands, or else you’ll be small potatoes. You’ll be on an inside page. And as in reality, so on “reality TV.” How long until the first TV death? How long until the second?

By the end of Orwell’s great novel
1984,
Winston Smith has been brainwashed. “He loved Big Brother.” As, now, do we.

JULY 2001: THE RELEASE OF THE BULGER KILLERS

Like a character in a Greek tragedy, a woman—Denise Fergus is her momentarily famous name—figuratively holds up the dead body of her murdered child, James Bulger, and howls for justice. The murderers have been released from jail, and the mother finds that unjust. “No matter where they are,” she cries, “someone will be waiting. No stone will be left unturned.” Then, descending from such classic blood-must-have-blood heights, and rather giving her game away, she adds, “For eight years I have kept my dignity. In the near future I will tell my side of the story.” Let us hope that this doesn’t mean that eye-for-an-eye calls for “justice” will soon be splashed all over a tabloid near you. Dignity doesn’t rate the front page, after all. And if one or other of the released men is killed by vigilantes—or if innocent men, mistaken for the freed killers, are attacked by the same vigilantes—then so much the better for sales.

The case of the 1993 Merseyside murder of two-year-old James Bulger by the then ten-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables raised big questions from the beginning. That the killers were themselves children, and that the killing was unusually brutal, made us ask ourselves about the nature of evil, a profound question inevitably rendered shallow by the media, for whom evil appeared to be some sort of videonasty manifestation of the “demon seed” variety. It was indeed suggested that Venables and Thompson had been influenced by a video nasty which, as it turned out, they hadn’t seen. But it wasn’t the killers who thought in the clichéd stereotypes of horror fiction. It was the British press.

Because of the ugliness of the murder, lots of people clearly find it impossible to accept that Venables and Thompson could have been successfully rehabilitated. For many, their reported sorrow is just a devious ploy. In Evelyn Waugh’s famous story “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing,” a murderer who has been, for many years, the mildest, gentlest, sweetest-natured prisoner imaginable is finally paroled, and instantly kills again. This fear of re-offending is constantly voiced by opponents of Venables’s and Thompson’s release, and this is the spark of suspicion that British newspapers are trying so hard to fan into a fire.

Yet all the best-informed sources have been telling us that Venables and Thompson really have changed; that they are poster boys for the efficacy of rehabilitation. Mark Leech of the ex-offenders charity Unlock, for example, says that there is “no prospect that they will re-offend.” So now we have to face this straightforward either/or decision. Either we believe that rehabilitation is possible, in which case we must accept the opinion of the experts that it has succeeded in these cases—or we reject that option, in which case, let’s stop trying to rehabilitate people and decide that prison sentences should be society’s revenge on criminals, who should be treated as lost causes and locked up for good in dreadful conditions. If people can’t get better, if rotten eggs are rotten eggs and bad apples can’t become good, then let’s just throw them away.

The big questions just keep on coming. Repentance and forgiveness aren’t as closely connected as people imagine. We sometimes forgive the unrepentant, and on other occasions condemn the genuinely remorseful. So even if the Bulger killers really are different now, even if the eighteen-year-olds who are to be released on life licenses have been utterly transformed, they can be allowed to live the rest of their lives in anonymous peace only if a separate process—call it the growth of fairness—in the hearts of those most injured by their crime and, beyond that, in society at large leads to their being forgiven.

It is because this is so complex and important a matter that the rabble-rousing behavior of much of the British press has seemed particularly disgusting, and the old accusations about it being out of control have seemed unusually apt. People, even lifetime free-speech stalwarts, have been saying that the behavior of the British tabloids makes the free-speech argument harder and harder to sustain—that a cherished democratic principle is being destruction-tested by yellow journalists. The feedback loop between events and their reporting is now so tight, so fast, that the media are major protagonists in the stories they report; and in this story they are working to subvert all civilized principles of justice and creating in their readers a lynch-mob mentality that may actually get people killed.

Something awful is happening here, some general degradation of public response caused by years of exposure to tabloid values. Spanish newspapers are reported to be prepared to pay big money for information about Venables’s and Thompson’s whereabouts—not because Spanish readers are particularly interested but because it’s summer and Spain is full of Brits. The Internet, that brothel of irresponsibility, has already started providing this information, and more will no doubt flood out soon. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson can run but they probably can’t hide, and in a Britain that’s increasingly conducting itself like Dodge City or Tombstone at their wildest, these young men will be lucky not to end up in Boot Hill. We can only hope they don’t, because on the run along with them is another idea of Britain, in which restraint is valued more highly than melodrama, compassion is better than revenge, and dignity is worth keeping for longer than eight years.

AUGUST 2001: ARUNDHATI ROY

Nargis, the Indian movie queen of the 1950s, who later had a career in politics, once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for making films that offered too negative an image of India. In her own movies, she said, she had always celebrated the positive. When asked for an example, she replied, “Dams.”

Big Dams (defined as those over fifteen meters—41 feet—high) have long been an essential part of India’s technological iconography, and their role in providing water and power to the nation was for a time unquestioned, even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has been “an increasingly confrontational debate about the role that large dams have played in development,” to quote the chairman of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), South Africa’s education minister, Professor Kader Asmal.

One of the biggest new dams under construction is the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River in the state of Gujarat, with a proposed final height of 136.5 meters (375 feet). Among its most vocal opponents is the novelist Arundhati Roy. “Big dams,” she says, “have let this country down.” She objects to the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the damage to the Narmada Valley’s fragile ecosystem, and points, tellingly, to the failure of many big dams to deliver what they promised. (India’s Bargi Dam, for example, irrigates only 5 percent of the area promised.) She argues further that while the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for a dam, it is the urban rich who benefit: “80 percent of rural households [still] have no electricity, 250 million people have no access to safe drinking water.”

The recent report of the WCD largely supports Roy’s arguments. The WCD was set up by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union and based its report on surveys of 125 large dams. (Mysteriously, permission to visit the Sardar Sarovar Project was refused by the Gujarat state government.) The report blames big dams for increased flooding, damage to farmland, the extinction of freshwater fishes. It agrees that the benefits of dams go largely to the rich, that many dams fall short of their targets, and that of the forty to eighty million people displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received the compensation they deserve. Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued that alternative methods are capable of meeting Gujarat’s water needs; the WCD report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on renewable energy, recycling, better irrigation, and reducing water losses.

The battle over the Narmada Dam has been long and bitter. However, there has been a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the protest movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, have been accused by five lawyers of having viciously attacked them during a December 13, 2000, protest, outside the Supreme Court in Delhi, against the Court’s decision to allow work on the Sardar Sarovar Project to proceed. Roy and Patkar allegedly called on the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Bhushan grabbed one by the hair and also allegedly threatened him with death.

All this somehow happened under the unconcerned noses of a large detachment of policemen. Curiously, the affray also passed unrecorded by the filmmaker Sanjay Kak, who was covering the demonstration with a video camera. And it was later revealed that Mr. Bhushan had in fact been somewhere else entirely at the time.

In spite of the demonstrable absurdity of these charges, however, the Supreme Court decided to entertain the lawyers’ petition and served the three activists with criminal-contempt notices. In doing so it ignored its own stipulated rules and procedures. The lawyers’ petition was incorrectly filled out and did not receive, as it should have, the written support of the attorney general. Most important of all, the Supreme Court did not try to authenticate the claims in the petition, even though video and eyewitness evidence was readily available.

Summoned to court, Arundhati Roy delivered a characteristically trenchant affidavit in which she said that the Court’s willingness to haul her and her colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges “indicates a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it.” The Supreme Court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she refused, and the Court is now considering contempt-of-court charges that could send her to jail. She is, as she told a British journalist, “now deeper in the soup.”

The Court should realize that by pursuing Arundhati Roy, Medha Patkar, and Prashant Bhushan in this fashion, it places itself before the court of world opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court has just disgraced itself internationally by carrying out the judicial coup that made George W. Bush “president.” (Two authoritative new books, by Alan Dershowitz and Vincent Bugliosi, leave no doubt that the U.S. Supremes made a politically motivated judgment that already looks like very bad law.) Can it be that the Supreme Court of the “world’s largest democracy” will emulate that of the world’s most powerful country by revealing itself to be biased—in this case against free speech—and prepared to act as the “muscle” for a particular interest group—in this case the powerful coalition of political and financial interests behind the Narmada Dam?

Only by abandoning its pursuit of Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners can the Supreme Court escape this judgment. It should do so at once.
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