LADIES LOVE OBSCURE RIVALRIES: SURVIVOR COOK ISLANDS v. SOCIAL PROGRESS

By Dan Raspatello, drapate@indiana.edu

This is a pretty dull week in sports, which will be replaced very soon with a mind-boggling amount of sports entertainment. We are on the eve of the MLB playoff run, college football’s opening week, and non-preseason NFL. Also, with the JonBenet guy (John Mark Karr) officially diagnosed as “fucking crazy,� there is not that much to talk about this week. But then I heard some amazing breaking news from my save-the-world-one-PC-comment-at-a-time mom.

Before I thought I would have to deliver some crap article about Grossman and Griese (because both are going to suck, that is just how Bears’ QBs operate), or the creepy 12 year olds in the Little League World Series (the ones that are 6’2� 210 at the age of 12), but then Survivor came out with their new concept for the upcoming season.

Survivor: Cook Island is taking a different approach to win back ratings that have slipped over the past couple of years. They have decided to turn their new season into a battle of the races. That’s right; they are putting together 4 teams of 5 members, and each team represents a different race. The four teams are, as labeled by Survivor, white, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American. By grouping the plethora of different countries and cultures into Asian Americans and Latin Americans, which they have spent years trying to get away from, Survivor has officially set back these peoples’ cause two generations.

CBS is splitting these teams up by their race, and making them have interracial competitions for “survival.� Thus, this is forcing them to have racial conflict. The host of Survivor is billing this as one of the greatest sociology experiments of all times. I know I only took Sociology 101 in college, but I don’t think Survivor can manipulate all the variables exactly how you would want them in a sociological experiment.

South Park gets slammed by the media for having an episode poking fun at Scientology, but a major network and the most popular reality TV show ever can make a program about deep-seeded racism. That makes about as much sense as, well, a sports rivalry website talking about a reality TV show.

If you go to the official Survivor website you will be able to see their brilliant promotional video (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor13/). They are billing this Survivor as evidence that all four ethnic groups can “for the most part get along� with only the constraints of civilization holding them together. But when civilization is taken away, and they are brought into “survivor mode� they will show their true colors. Survivor is pitching a show that claims that when taken out of society, all races are predisposed to hating each other. I think the KKK is suing CBS for stealing the philosophy behind their organization. Seriously, did the Confederacy win? Are all those Civil War recreations in the South actually right? Are those pick-up trucks with Confederate flags really that far off? Could those uncomfortable racist comments by our grandparents been really that off the wall?

First of all, FOX News, and all the crazy right wingers alike, owe CBS a huge apology. Come every election year FOX News, and the guy who thinks the government has no right to take away his gun but has every right to listen to our phone calls, complains about all the major networks (not counting FOX) having a liberal bias. Bob O’Reilly, pick up your phone and call Dan Rather and apologize. CBS has gone more right wing than the love child of Mel Gibson and Ann Coulter.

I think if they are going to do this whole racism thing on Survivor they should throw some stereotypical stipulations into it. Like Asian Americans should get technology that is just a little bit better then all the other teams, or the white (I can’t believe they didn’t call us Caucasians… will we ever get respect from mainstream society?) people team should get the power to only count the votes they want to at the tribal counsel (that is what they call the meeting were they vote people off the show) or close the polls as the African American team is about to vote. They should have really stereotypical competitions that everybody assumes a certain race will be good at. The four competitions could be like basketball, futbol (or soccer if you want to be a dick about it), physics, and sailing. They also should have another island that is way worse and government-funded, that nobody else wanted to live on, and stick a 5th Native American team there. Lastly, whenever an Asian American participant speaks they should have the audio of the tape a little slower so that their mouth movements and voice are not in-sync… What? I’m not the one who thought of the show.

Alright, that is all I got for right now, but I am going to end with some gambling lines for the upcoming season of Survivor.

• Over/Under 2 ½ episodes before a racist white male emerges that all of America becomes disgusted with, but can’t stop watching.

• 3/1 that the first racist comment is made by a white guy from the South, who will cry on the last episode and ask for forgiveness from the guy he directed his comment to

• 1/1 that at the end of the season there is some feel good moment about how in the end, all the participants needed each other to survive.