Faux Poor: Awash in Sea of Affluence

Here we are in the middle of what is clearly the “Survivor” summer. We sit glued to our TV sets, and the show’s concomitant Web site, week after week--invested in the fates of some photogenic fame-aholics willing to rough it on some deserted island for our amusement and, of course, their potential financial windfall. This is weird stuff, if you actually think about it. I’m not talking about the voyeuristic aspect of the show; TV is voyeuristic per se. Nor about the celebrity mania of our culture--by now a well-recycled plaint.

No, what’s really weird about this show and those like it (“Big Brother,” etc.) is what they’re truly depicting: a form of faux deprivation. They’re offering up a parody of homelessness and hunger that should be morally disturbing. Here you take a bunch of attractive, healthy and mostly young people, dress them up in seashells and bikinis and let them stare balefully into the camera, complaining about their empty bellies and leaky huts when millions around the globe truly have empty bellies and live in leaky huts. And we don’t get it. Or we don’t seem to. We have certainly not been talking about it.

It’s bizarre, is it not, for us to be sitting in comfortable living rooms watching these people pretend to struggle for food and shelter, while millions around the world are actually struggling, including the one in five U.S. children now living below the poverty line? No doubt it is easier--on some level more palatable--to watch so-called reality programming like “Survivor” rather than real reality. That’s not a redundancy anymore; you have to separate out real reality--i.e., programs about true hunger and homelessness--from fake reality.

Yes, the show can be amusing, intriguing, addictive even. But you come away feeling as if you’d entered some surreal universe in which people’s serious problems have been transformed into some soap-operaish sporting event for your amusement. We sit back and watch, rooting for our favorites to survive, grimacing while they eat rats and larvae, as if it were all some kind of inside joke--as if hunger were a game show. Come, sign up and you, too, can starve for $1 million. Of course, none of these contestants is really going to starve. The worst thing that’s going to happen to them is they’re going to be voted off the island before getting the loot--left to hustle around the news/talk show circuit and capitalize on their fast-evaporating fame.

When affluence becomes invisible.

We live in odd times, where the rift between those who have and those who don’t is increasingly exaggerated. It is not the poor or the have-nots who are invisible, as some suggest, but quite the reverse. It is the affluence among us that is now so taken for granted it has become invisible. This is certainly true in a big booming city like this one, where the haves move around in a kind of insulated tribal pod, riding the freeways in their SUVs, eating in the same hip restaurants, sending their kids to the same private schools--and, yes, watching “Survivor” (which does especially well among the young and well-off).

This isn’t the gilded ostentation of the 1980s. That was easy to spot, to lambaste or lampoon. It was the era of “Dynasty,” of the expensively suited society ladies who lunch (or more accurately pick)--of limos and froufrou dresses and splashy, in-your-face signs and symbols of wealth. Today’s version of wealth is a little sneakier, a little less flamboyant, a little more self-conscious. In no small part because it is in the hands of the aging baby boomers--and their educated, computer-literate offspring--the all-grown-up ‘60s kids who have hit pay dirt.

They might not flaunt it in the old ‘80s manner, but it’s there--in the tinted-window SUVs, the good clothes, the artful and restrained interior decor, the tutored and pampered kids. There are people living as well now on this Earth--right here in Los Angeles--as any people have ever lived. (I include in this myself and my colleagues in the media/entertainment world.) They are living with a financial ease and designer-label grace and an often inevitable isolation from the dramas and discomforts of the less well-off, who also live right here. Not to mention, of course, the walking wounded of the earth, the millions of displaced refugees around the globe, or the famine victims, or the babies with AIDS.

This isolation, this disconnect from the real real world that most people live in is apparent in the complaining one often hears now from so many in this group because they feel “poorer” than their neighbors--who are also millionaires.

In his clever new book, writer David Brooks calls this new American elite “bobos,” meaning they are one part “bohemian,” one part “bourgeois,” which, in effect, allows them to have their cake (or baby fennel) and eat it too. They vocally worry about the decline of public education (the bohemian part) while sending their kids to private schools (the bourgeois part). They vocally worry about the environment while driving gas-guzzling SUVs. And they vocally worry about the plight of the true have-nots while watching the pretend have-nots cavort weekly across their TV screens in island wear. They can and do engage in philanthropic giving, but sometimes in a little too public and self-serving way. Philanthropy as a photo op.

In fairness, this disconnect is not just an L.A. affliction, nor even a uniquely American one. We’re witnessing a kind of global gloat, if you will, a global insensitivity on the part of the thriving haves toward the have-nots, who fall farther and farther behind. Both “Survivor” and “Big Brother,” in fact, originated elsewhere, the former in Sweden, the latter in Holland. Britain also gave us “The 1900 House,” broadcast here on PBS. It shows a middle-class family living for three months like a family in 1900. At first glance, it might read as a bit more uplifting or educational than the others. But, at base, it’s the same stuff: fake deprivation, people pretending to go without what many of us now take for granted--modern plumbing and electricity and supermarkets--but what much of the world still does go without.

No doubt, there will be more programs like these. Clearly fake reality is selling big and fake deprivation is the thing of the moment. But, as always with these things, the success of “Survivor” tells us a lot more about ourselves than it does about the show’s producers and participants. Call it the summer of our disconnect.