August
30, 2002 9:00 a.m. Minstrel
Show
Reality TV goes over the top at CBS.
hat
if a major television network sent out teams to search the Bronx, Compton,
and the south side of Chicago looking for a large "multi-generational
family" of poor black folks, who would move into a Beverly Hills
mansion for a year? Cameras would follow the Negroes around, capturing
their fish-out-of-water hijinks for the entertainment of millions of viewers,
who will be invited to laugh as the urban rustics squirm and gawk in front
of their social betters.
If that were true,
there would be no end to the outrage over the racist exploitation and
class denigration inherent in such a morally rancid enterprise. Jesse
Jackson would be all over creation, raising hell about a media corporation
sponsoring a minstrel show — and for once in my life, I'd have to
agree with him.
In fact, this is a true story, but the hapless rubes CBS is searching
out are not African Americans, but
poor southern whites, the only ethnic group in the country that it
is permissible to mock in polite company. It's for a reality-TV project
to be titled, The Real Beverly Hillbillies. "We're looking
for a family from a very rural area that hasn't been exposed to big-city
life or luxuries of life in any way," a CBS spokesman told the Washington
Post.
How charming. Ship the toothless poor white trash in from Appalachia,
set them down amid immense luxury, and watch the dopes make inadvertent
fools of themselves in front of the rich and beautiful. The Real Beverly
Hillbillies they're calling it. Some fun that'll be. Yes sir, southern
white people — the kind who tend to own guns, believe in God, love
their country and vote Republican — are Hollywood's niggers.
Now, I don't want to get sanctimonious about this, because I have dined
out many an evening on redneck stories from my rural southern childhood,
which began in a house trailer off of Highway 61. My mom and dad grew
up poor, but made it into the middle class through hard work, education,
and thrift. Where I'm from, people from all social classes live more or
less together, and it's impossible either to romanticize or demonize the
poor, because you know them.
Now, the fact that
someone is poor or otherwise disadvantaged doesn't mean they cease to
be human, which is to say, prone to all sorts of folly. If somebody is
acting like a fool, their race, class, or religion shouldn't protect them
from the mockery of their fellow fools, like you and me. These kinds of
polite pieties are a great obstacle to honest appraisal of social reality.
But there's something to be said for the unwritten rule of joke telling
that says I can talk about my kind, but don't you dare. My friend Thomas,
one of the best storytellers I know, is coming to visit this weekend,
and we'll sit around drinking and telling hilarious stories of our friends
and family back home in rural Louisiana. We're entitled to; these are
our people. But woe betide any Yankee who tries that. I know it's illogical,
but if you have to ask, "How come black people can say 'nigger' but
white people can't?," you're obviously as dumb as a stump and deserve
what you get if you try that in front of black folks. Same deal with the
poor white-trash stories.
And there's something repulsive about telling these stories in a way that
inspires nothing but contempt for an entire group of people who, whatever
their sins, have a heavier cross to bear than most of us. That's why one
wrinkle in this hateful tale of Hollywood crassness is particularly galling.
One of the developers of this real-life Beverly Hillbillies is
a documentary filmmaker named Dub Cornett, who lives in rural Virginia
and calls himself an "Appalachian-American." He tells the Washington
Post that he expects the joke to be on the snooty Beverly Hills folk,
not the rednecks he hopes to recruit.
"If you look
at the real 'Beverly Hillbillies,' Jed was the one guy you had any respect
for, not the banker," Cornett told the Post.
"We will accomplish
the most if we cast it well with people who respect themselves but see
the humor in themselves. We will end up with a piece that truly has, God
forbid, social commentary, and maybe will enlighten, that it's not all
barefoot hillbillies," he said.
"Most of America
can only imagine what it's like to live in Beverly Hills and live in a
multimillion-dollar mansion. We can share this advantage with them, rather
than laugh at them." But, he said, "If somebody is a stereotypical
swing-from-the-trees hillbilly who shoots the lights out and parks cars
in the front yard — hey, it happens. I live near that."
Yeah, and he's really
hoping to find a noble savage to "enlighten" America. What a
load of horse manure. It's true that literature has long made use of the
fool to reveal the folly of the high and mighty, and that's what The
Beverly Hillbillies did, to an extent. But that's fiction;
those scenes can be manipulated by the artist for morally instructive
effect. Nonfiction is not amenable to this kind of shading, and Cornett
knows it.
No, his are the weasel
words of a phony trying to talk himself into taking the money he's being
offered to help hold up a desperate Appalachian family to national ridicule.
I defy anyone to
watch some poor nobodies from the hills of West Virginia shuffling down
Rodeo Drive in their overalls, to the mockery of all and sundry, and not
feel ashamed. Even worse, underprivileged rural children will be part
of the twisted game. Won't that be great, watching a little girl raised
in the hookworm belt, peering in the windows at Fred Hayman and saying
quaint dumb things about the purty clothes? One is reminded of Bruce Springsteen's
mournful song, "Mansion
on the Hill," a tale of working-class longing for a life
of ease and pleasure denied them by fate and circumstance, but enjoyed
by the privileged folks who live in the big house behind the steel gates.
"In the summer all the lights would shine/There'd be music playin',
people laughin' all the time/Me and my sister, we'd hide out in the tall
corn fields/Sit and listen to the mansion on the hill."
Giving people, including children, who have nothing the opportunity to
live in a mansion on the hill in exchange for their dignity: that's what
the wealthy bicoastal elites who run CBS consider funny.
I think also of Rick Bragg's moving memoir, All
Over But the Shoutin', in which the New York Times reporter
tells of growing up poor in rural Alabama, the son of an alcoholic father
and a hard-working mother, who cleaned rich people's commodes so her sons
would have clothes on their backs. What kind of heartless Hollywood bastards
would dangle the chance to live for a year in unimaginable luxury in front
of people like the Bragg family, who sometimes barely had enough food
to eat — and tell them they can have it all in exchange for their
integrity?
The Real Beverly Hillbillies concept is revolting, and the no-class
CBS Television division should catch hell for it (go here
for the online comment box). It should be noted that when this program
starts taping, America will probably be at war. It will not be sons of
network executives fighting and dying for this country's liberty and security;
it will be the sons of the farmers, the coal miners, and the factory workers,
a disproportionate number of them — the white ones, at least —
from low-income, southern homes. Young men from Appalachian hollers may
die while CBS Television executives make money condescending to and insulting
their people.
It is an outrage,
but poor white folks are used to it. Nobody speaks up for them.
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hat
if a major television network sent out teams to search the Bronx, Compton,
and the south side of Chicago looking for a large "multi-generational
family" of poor black folks, who would move into a Beverly Hills
mansion for a year? Cameras would follow the Negroes around, capturing
their fish-out-of-water hijinks for the entertainment of millions of viewers,
who will be invited to laugh as the urban rustics squirm and gawk in front
of their social betters.
