The cultural divide between rural and urban America has NBN thinking of a deer hunting trip some 25 years ago. At the dinner table after a day of same my buddy’s high-school-aged son mentioned watching a lynx prancing around in the snow. “And you didn’t shoot it,” the father asked incredulously. The son stammered, the conversation turned and the exchange was soon forgotten. The lesson clearly was not. The next time we saw father and son together it was with forearms draped over a pick-up truck bed. Scattered before us lay a dozen much maligned mallards, scant parts of which may have made it to a dinner table. More likely a landfill, after serving a six-month sentence in a basement freezer. Hunting and fishing animals you actually eat can be fun and rewarding. Fussing with all the fins, feathers, fur, gamey meat and freezer burn is not. Not when $6 ribeyes are on sale.
Which today begs the question: Why hunt at all when we throw out 40 percent of the food we create? In a word: tradition and a desperate lack thereof. America is the new kid on the block when it comes to world history. Our 200 to 400 years on this planet pale beside Europe’s 2,000 to 4,000. Commerce, capitalism, consumption and, most notably, their unfettered pursuit comprise much of what this young country is all about. Common threads, stitching together much older beliefs and behaviors imported the world over. American is a patchwork culture that unraveled once and, some argue, never really recovered.
Those ties are being sorely tested again. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are just the flotsam and jetsam of much more powerful undercurrents. Science and technology are threatening with inconsequence industries, economies, and labor forces that defined for generations the American Dream. Who can blame tens of millions of angry old white guys and their women folk still living that dream, for grasping for the Good ‘ol Days. It sure beats watching your raison d’etre evaporate before your eyes. Such sentiments are low hanging fruit for the captains of commerce, capitalism and consumption.
Enter what NBN calls Lowest Common Denominator TV, or LCD TV. Programs like “Gold Rush,” “Most Dangerous Catch,” “Swamp People,” “Mountain Men” “Logger Men,” “Ice Road Truckers,” “Moonshiners.” Coalescing from these dark corners of cable TV is a shadow culture where making money any “old fashioned” way is the American Way. Handsome, twenty-somethings denuding acres of Alaskan wilderness for a half ounce of gold flakes isn’t profligate, it’s patriotic. Regularly risking your life fishing in Bering Sea snow storms or wrestling alligators in Louisiana swamps for $30,000 without benefits? These aren’t questionable career choices, it’s earning a living.
Mass media moguls making millions feeding the bottom of the consumer food chain a dead-end vision of America is bad, right? Not necessarily. What if, ultimately, LCD TV is turning these people the producers and profiteers intend for us to admire into items of curiosity? Entertaining icons of Americana, not anyone we’d actually want living next-door or visiting for the holidays. Consider programs like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Here come the Kardashians,”“Housewives of” –fill in-the-blank, “Teen and Pregnant,”“Long Island Medium,” and “Love & Hip Hop.” These modern-day portraits of domesticity are even more absurd efforts to breathe life into an even faster deflating Conservative American feminine mystique.
The phenomenon of Donald Trump makes clear this country still has its share of real-life Mama Junes and Phil Robertsons. Conservative Tea Party types who no doubt feel vindicated seeing themselves broadcast as lovable dolts. Embracing every form of ignorance the P.T. Barnum’s and Donald Trumps amass fortunes exploiting has a reassuring familiarity. Conservationists meanwhile can console themselves with the very real prospect that LCD TV might also be hastening the death spiral of our hillbilly heritage. Milking the whole land-of-the-free-and-home-of-the-brave thing works only as long as there are frontiers to plunder and Indians to kill.
As we rapidly run out of same it seems inevitable America will come to embrace our European heritage ever tighter. Hard work, humility and piety are what propelled the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock. Expanses of untouched natural resources gave greed and avarice a chance to leverage those virtues into an “American” standard of living envied the world over. Now, as the outlets for our industry evolve from dirt-under-the-nails to high-speed internet, a new reality is emerging. Consumer credos of working and wasting our lives away only offer diminishing returns as those once unlimited resources also diminish. It’s a reality the rest of the world has a several-thousand-year jump on.
So perhaps we owe a debt of gratitude to LCD TV, Donald Trump and all those profiting by keeping our trash cans full. They are laying bare the absurdity of devoting our lives to winning or losing at the expense of how we play the game. Or, killing things for the simple pleasure, or primitive rush, of being able to do so. LCD TV’s ever-escalating antics to elevate our consumer culture are destine to evolve from entertainment to embarrassment. It may take a little while, yet. Honey Boo Boos can be downright adorable when Momma Junes are not making us cringe on behalf of the whole of humanity. But eventually, inevitably NBN believes, they will leave us just with those traditions that instill in us pride, not profits.
