The Amazing Race

I do not watch Reality TV.  I do not like it.  In a box. Or with a fox.  As my writer friend Sheila O’Connor has said, reality shows are more scripted than any other story presented.  All the “honest” “real time” looks at people acting on the shows are meticulously crafted to fit the 46 minutes in the time slot, and perfectly matched with the trembling momentous sound track.  Not to mention that the way to win on the Bachelor, Survivor or Big Brother is to lie, plot, be dishonest and back stab.

My wife and I love to watch “The Good Wife” on Sunday evenings, for a variety of reasons: great cast, constant plot twists, and characters whose morality is not cut and dried.  During football season, the start time depends on when the late football game ends, which is usually later than scheduled, which means 60 Minutes is delayed, and then The Amazing Race is delayed, so when we turn to CBS at the scheduled time, we usually get the last 10 minutes or 15 minutes, or God forbid, 20 minutes of teams of racers working out their marital or friendship or work relationship problems while doing stunts in Austria, Kenya, Costa Rica, or the exotic country du jour.  I’ve tried to figure out the appeal of the show, besides the obvious one of feeling superior to the people who in it (a character defect of mine that’s not hard to summon forth).  I haven’t found it.  Maybe it’s a sense of “seeing” a country without being there.   Maybe it’s imagining that we could do the stunts required: sing an opera piece, drive a race car, walk on coals or whatever they do.

What is especially infuriating to me is that the “natives” of the country the racers are in are always colorful, unthreatening and helpful. In fact their whole role in the story is to serve as helpers for the valiant Americans on their journeys of adventure.  They are never fully human, they don’t really act: either in the theatrical sense of inhabiting and expressing a character, nor in the human sense of having agency or power.  They can frustrate one of the pairs of racers, they can assist one of the pairs, depending on the script.  But they are as important to the story as the setting or props are.

I know I’m being especially cynical tonight.  It does make me wonder what this show—or any of the reality shows that are beamed around the planet—have to say about the projection of our values and our power.  What do they say about how we see the rest of the world?  On the basest level, it indicates that we see the world as our playground, and that the rules of engagement can and should be the same wherever we find ourselves.   Our rules, obviously.

I have lived and worked in neighborhoods in the US that—had they better hotels—could be a location for a reality show.  They tend to be presented in the media as exotic, colorful even dangerous.  A perfect place to have an adventure, especially if you don’t have to deal with the people as people.  When we lived in Philadelphia, a member of our community center’s board was a drug and alcohol counselor in the suburbs.  A group of parents of teenagers asked her to help organize a tour to our neighborhood, so that other parents could actually the places where the drugs their children used were sold.  We laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation—I mean would you want us to arrange a drive-by shooting to happen on the tour, to heighten “the reality” of the situation?  To my knowledge, the trip never happened.  But the insult—the inability to see people in our community as human, as complex, mysterious beings—still rankles me.  

Recently an article about a marvelous mural we did in our community led with this sentence: “The blighted corner of Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis just got a giant pick-me-up in the form of a 3,000-square-foot mural adorning La Mexicana Grocery.”  I’m grateful the writer covered the story.  I just wish she had talked to a few folks who live and work near the corner.  “Blighted” would not be the word we picked.  Folks here would be as realistic about the problems of the community as anyone, but the reality they see would include the beauty, the hope, the longing for justice that the community has as well.

(See the whole piece at: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/230088101.html)

 

A fuller article on the mural (notice the different lead) is at: http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2013/10/28/new-minneapolis-mosaic-mural-dedicated-lake-street

The dedication of the mural coincided with the opening of our youth photography show “Under Construction”.  (I’ll send a link to the show, once there is one!).  Our neighborhood was full of construction projects this year: street closures, bridge closures, big machines, detours, the whole works.  The young people took photos of that construction, but also looked at how the world is constructed, how a community is built.  The poem below is not finished, but meant to honor their vision of reality: one both realistic and hopeful.  The quote from a Machado poem is on the big mural; it’s also the way the people in our community--and I think many of the places "visited" on the Amazing Race--seek to live.

Be justice.  Be beauty.

Patrick

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

 

Se hace el camino al andar

Golpe a golpe, verso a verso

José Antonio Machado

Hand by hand, eye by eye,

the children build the world.
A picture of a tree growing out
of a sidewalk, a photo
of a bridge closed for repair,
a flower hidden behind a fence.
They cut tiles to create mosaics
of monarchs and beetle bugs,
They plant tomatillos and jalapeños
to conjure into salsa, they ask questions.

Some of their parents may be deported.

Some of their friends may not live to be adults.
And yet their eyes keep seeking
that which is broken, not to deny
its power or pass it off as funny,
but to see the light that is already
at work, turning its cavernous dark
into hope.   Look at their work. Look
at the eyes they see beyond the world. 
They do not recreate the reality
they see, but the reality they need.
They make their way,
they make ours, blow
by blow, verse by verse.