UNREALITY

I remember the first time I saw The Apprentice in 2005. My first wife and I had two children under the age of two and, with no relatives for a thousand miles, were under virtual house arrest.  The reality show tropes of sluts, nuts, pettiness and catfights were all on display with the added bonus that MBA grads (which neither of us were) would get humiliated and fired after screwing up basic tasks their uneducated audience could easily accomplish. At the end of each episode, Donald Trump (who I knew from reading newspapers to be a lying, debt-riddled conman) would pass judgement on the contestants and fire one.

“Fuck this shit, they’re training us to be slaves,” I told her. She accused me of over-reacting, which I probably was. As a member of the Writer’s Guild, the move to reality television bothered me because people believed it was real even though the shows were clearly scripted by unacknowledged writers. Like other Mark Burnett productions, Survivor and The Bachelor,  The Apprentice shared the same plot mechanism to drive their stories forward – people must be eliminated each week.

The show cross-pollinated with gossip magazines, creating an endless loop of vapid drama which could surround the audience from the supermarket checkout lane to a dentist’s waiting room.  People could be surrounded by unreality everywhere they went, until it soaked into their consciousness.  All of it geared to one over-arching goal –  make  money by encouraging the worship of the rich.

It’s no wonder this unreality merged with the other great unreality in America, the evangelical prosperity gospel, where Christ is portrayed as somebody who can help you get rich, a  belief system where prophets are used to generate profits despite Christ proclaiming  in the actual gospels that “the meek shall inherit the Earth,” and a “rich man can enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a camel can fit through the eye of a needle.”  The Prosperity Gospel preachers edit gospel reality out of their sermons the same way The Apprentice edited Trump’s reality out of the show. In another great matchup with reality TV, the prosperity evangelicals plot is also driven forward with a belief in elimination – the end times.

These unrealities, a more sophisticated word for lies, reinforced each other for almost two decades before peoples’ perception of reality was warped enough for Trump to be “elected” President.  The delivery instrument for both was television – a light broadcast into our homes.

I find it fascinating that these lies are transmitted to us via light, to distract us with money and power, as the real world literally burns from what scientists, who study the observable truths of God’s creation, predict will be our end – climate change.