Sunday, September 24, 2006
My Sept. 11th suggestions for world peace prompted one reader to propose the world engage in love making on such a massive scale that eventually all races and creeds would become the lovely, sensuous color of a Rolo.
We now move from that idea to its exact opposite: segregation. Or as its known today, Survivor: Cook Islands.
Actually, despite all the uproar and mass sponsorship withdrawals, this Survivor has been nothing other than… well, Survivor. After all, this is a show that, in past seasons, has divided contestants by age and gender. Dividing them by race was never that far off nor is it all that shocking.
Or all that interesting. I don’t know what I expected, but it turns out that when you divide a bunch of Survivor contestants by race you get a bunch of Survivor contestants: the young punk who wants to take charge, the slacker girl who just sunbathes all day, the heavy metal guy who kinda goes crazy and falls in love at the slightest sign of affection. Okay, that last one is unique to Cook Islands and did make for interesting TV.
The most remarkable thing I’ve seen has not been divisions between the races, but between the ages. On the Puka tribe (the Asian tribe) there’s this cat (pictured right) named Cao Boi (pronounced Cowboy, how great is that?) who keeps making racist Asian jokes (like “What do you call a Vietnamese person with three dogs?” no punch line given) and his twenty and thirty-something tribe mates react with unmitigated horror every time this guy opens his mouth.
See, these kids all grew up and, like me, went to college in the PC age. Whereas Cao Boi emigrated from Vietnam when he was 11 and probably had to deal with these same racist jokes all his life. So instead of letting the hurt in (sigh) he’s made the jokes a part of who he is. They can’t hurt him if he’s the one spitting jokes out like an over-caffeinated Don Rickles.
I was kind of hoping for something unique from this season of Survivor. The racial division did seem like an interesting sociological twist. Perhaps, by dividing Survivor contestants along racial lines, I wanted to see questions of why we are still basically divided racially in our everyday lives, if not answered at least, raised. Instead the only question being addressed on Survivor so far is what do you call a Vietnamese person with three dogs?
We now move from that idea to its exact opposite: segregation. Or as its known today, Survivor: Cook Islands.
Actually, despite all the uproar and mass sponsorship withdrawals, this Survivor has been nothing other than… well, Survivor. After all, this is a show that, in past seasons, has divided contestants by age and gender. Dividing them by race was never that far off nor is it all that shocking.
Or all that interesting. I don’t know what I expected, but it turns out that when you divide a bunch of Survivor contestants by race you get a bunch of Survivor contestants: the young punk who wants to take charge, the slacker girl who just sunbathes all day, the heavy metal guy who kinda goes crazy and falls in love at the slightest sign of affection. Okay, that last one is unique to Cook Islands and did make for interesting TV.
The most remarkable thing I’ve seen has not been divisions between the races, but between the ages. On the Puka tribe (the Asian tribe) there’s this cat (pictured right) named Cao Boi (pronounced Cowboy, how great is that?) who keeps making racist Asian jokes (like “What do you call a Vietnamese person with three dogs?” no punch line given) and his twenty and thirty-something tribe mates react with unmitigated horror every time this guy opens his mouth.
See, these kids all grew up and, like me, went to college in the PC age. Whereas Cao Boi emigrated from Vietnam when he was 11 and probably had to deal with these same racist jokes all his life. So instead of letting the hurt in (sigh) he’s made the jokes a part of who he is. They can’t hurt him if he’s the one spitting jokes out like an over-caffeinated Don Rickles.
I was kind of hoping for something unique from this season of Survivor. The racial division did seem like an interesting sociological twist. Perhaps, by dividing Survivor contestants along racial lines, I wanted to see questions of why we are still basically divided racially in our everyday lives, if not answered at least, raised. Instead the only question being addressed on Survivor so far is what do you call a Vietnamese person with three dogs?
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Let me take a stab at the punch-line... What do you call a Vietnamese guy with 3 dogs? A restauranteur. :)
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