Everyone of us has basic, often unreflected, primitive desires. Not as basic as food and water, but just one step above that, most of them being somehow related to society and social interaction. I personally need something to quench my thirst for schadenfreude. Luckily this word has been adopted by the english speaking world, so I can at least be halfway sure it hits the point I wanna make when I use it.
There's lots of sources to feed this urge. If you open the newspaper you can easily find half a metric fuckton of stuff you can laugh about in a very dark manner. Police and fire brigades should get better a better, digital radio service. It has cost billions already, will cost way more than calculated and has proven to be practically useless in a lot of situations already.
But what do you do when you want a good laugh about some people? Yes, first level support works excellent for that, but those people get on your nerves beforehand, which outweighs the laughing afterward and I also tend to feel sorry for those poor beings. I often enough had contact with people whose business relied on something they could barely switch on and now broke, taking all their data and work with it into oblivion. And I am not cold hearted enough to just say "Well, if those data would have really been important, you would have a backup!" and not feel sorry for them. Yes, the central IT at my job delivers good laughs, but for the price of seeing all my co-workers upset because yet another half of a workday goes down the gutter.
But this Friday there's been starting the new season of our German version of "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!". Yes, we do have bullshit TV, too, and what's even worse is that we pay an assload for the non-private stations and there's no real choice to get around that anymore. But some of the shit is bad and low enough to actually be good again. Especially because they garnish it with a lot of really degrading humor and malice.
The format itself is just perfect to show off the most primitive ways of human social interaction and how badly you can fail at that if a bit of stress uncovers your personal weaknesses. And you can laugh about that with an at least halfway good conscience, because all of those people chose their fate themselves. Of course, most of them are lured by money and haunted by debts, but we have insolvency for individuals for that and also a social system that would leave none of them homeless or hungry. No, they all chose to expose themselves to the laughter and sadism of the viewers all by themselves. They should know that they are going to be made fun of and the past has shown that the viewers like to torment them and love to see them tortured. Oh what fun was it back some years when they had to make Daniel Kueblboeck unchoosable because he was voted to the bushtucker trials three times in a row, getting closer to despair and upright agony, screaming louder and louder each time. There was a channel on Quakenet at that time populated by thousands of people solely because they wanted to share their loud laughter about his ordeals.
Yes, I admit that I am a bit sadistic, but the last paragraph might give you a false impression. If those poor sould wouldn't have a choice I'd find this horrifying. It's rather like cracking the whip at a woman (is that an existing expression even?). It is a disgusting act of cruelty, unless she is into BDSM and literally begs you to.
What I do ask myself, though, is if some of those third and fourth row celebrities really ever had the chance of making a really conscious decision. This year there's indication that Sarah Knappik, a former contestant of the show "Germany's next Top Model", is going to get her ass kicked by the viewers. The reason for that is easy to see. A spoiled blond brat that not just talks like she's seen everything already, but also whines dramatically and excuses her own fail with "having gotten the hardest trial of all" is so inviting to be bashed. The really sorry thing is that she might actually not just act like a stupid smug girl, but really believe the utter crap that drools out of her mouth constantly. This would necessitate, though, that she has no view of herself that really coincides the slightest bit with the way she is perceived by other people. And wouldn't that somehow be tragic, not sad, but tragic in the original sense of Greek drama? She indeed would have never had a real choice, because one of the most important aspects to base the decision on would have been out of scope for her
And if you see that such a poor and dumb little brat gets near traumatized by having to crawl through some dirty tunnels, isn't it simply cruel to insist on her maturity?
I say yes. But such is life. I'm going to laugh on. But maybe I should read some Bertrand Russel in bed to make up for the lost brain cells and ensure I don't lose the base that I use to justify my arrogance.
You takin' that serious?
No comments:
Post a Comment