The other day I saw an ad for the twelfth season of Survivor based in Panama. This time there’s a “twist” and every week a member of the “tribe” will get sent to something called Exile Island. For the span of a television season, a swarthy group of sixteen middle class, mostly Caucasian, participants will pretend to live as if they were truly destitute. They will have to actually — gasp! — fend for themselves AND play group games for the chance to win a million US dollars.
I can see marketing material for potential participants now: Yes, you too, can learn to live like you were truly poor AND have a chance at winning a million dollars! That’s not surviving. That’s like going on a poverty vacation. Furthermore, in some circles that’s called “detox”. Here’s a reality check: those who are really poor just stay that way; they don’t win nothin’.
And why do these folks have to go all the way to Panama? If it’s supposed to be REALITY TV why not make it interesting? Why not drop them off in the middle of the South Bronx? Without any money. Or clothes. Better yet, why not drop them in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro? Or the slums of Calcutta? Or the shantytowns/townships outside Johannesburg where AIDS has ravaged whole populations? Now that’s REAL surviving. Day One’s task could consist of contestants running around trying not to get shot as they found a way to clothe themselves and begged for money and food. But I guess America’s viewing public wouldn’t want to see something like that; it would hit too close too home. They would rather watch an artificial environment of abjectness be created than witness the real thing.
If one of our intrepid, Machiavellian contestants could make it out of one of these places alive, they would deserve the million dollars. Which raises the question: what is TRUE survival? Is it being shipped via private jet courtesy of CBS studios to some tropical paradise and hanging out for several weeks while cameras watched your every move? Is it getting voted off and making rounds on the talk show circuit and then, if you’re lucky, landing a bit part in some B-minus comedy alongside an old SNL cast member? Is it actually winning the million dollars and, after thirty percent of it gets taken away by the government, getting to buy a new S.U.V., getting some massages and eating your weight in McDonald’s? Is that survival? I think not.
Is this the best we can come up with? On one channel you have model wannabes eating worms and swimming around vats of cow innards trying to fish out sheep testicles with their teeth for a million dollars while on another channel you have some surgically-enhanced narcissists trying to score a lifemate as well as a million dollars. True survival is living with starvation, disease, poverty, crime, a disability, overwhelming social and cultural obstacles etc. and living to see the next day without succumbing to the perils and addictions around you. The person who deserves that million dollars is someone who makes it out of these communities intact. Not some office manager or stock broker or performance artist who took some time off of their day job so that they could yuck it up on national television.