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To Watch a Predator
for release 04-04-07
Washington DC
Being a news junky, I was delighted at the advent of cable TV with it's 24 hour news cycle. I could have my fix any time of day or night. Now I'm not so sure. It's a wasteland out there, folks. We had two weeks of wall-to-wall Anna Nicole and you can't twist the dial without encountering endless rapes and predations and entrapments.
Nancy (dis)Grace is bad enough with her relentless hard-bitch prosecutorial attitude as she salaciously recounts the most disgusting human escapades, and John Walsh runs his cheesy little American Idol of Crime, but the most egregiously sleazy of the tabloid programs is To Catch a Predator. Oh, I know it makes for great TV to see some poor sucker with a pocketful of Viagra and condoms sitting there in a puddle of his own guilty sweat and a semi-erection and visions of fourteen year old sugar plums dancing in his head, while getting chastised by Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC before being thrown to the ground in the front yard by the cops. Oh, yes, it's enough to make any American proud.
Forget the fact that there was no fourteen year old girl to begin with and the victim was seduced by an adult cop who was wasting your tax dollars playing role games on the internet. It makes great TV.
Let's face it. We all love to see somebody else get caught for expressing our own darkest desires. When some preacher or politician is caught in a room full of prostitutes, we get a secret thrill. But you have to wonder what these guys were thinking when they arranged a rendezvous with even a hypothetical fourteen year old girl. When I was a teen-ager, the saying was, "a hard dick has no conscience." Well, apparently it has no sense either. I wonder if they get these guys from Central Casting? I can't believe that any real person would be so stupid as to fall for this ruse. There was the guy that showed up naked, c'mon. But then again, thousands show up at the American Idol cattle calls for a promised fling with the underaged whore of Fame.
I've written about the subject of entrapment before. Entrapment is a disgusting affair. It's bad enough when cops do it because business is slow, but when it is sponsored by network and cable TV for the prurient purpose of producing potty entertainment, then it becomes a sad comment on the state of our culture.
We want to know all about Britany's comings and goings from rehab, because we secretly want to know how much fun she had getting there. We want to experience it with her, all the joys and dancing and parties and flashbulbs going off in her face and magazine covers and even the crash and burn, but we want to experience it all from the comfort of our living rooms on cable TV. Glamour and success require far too much work and pain for most of us. We would rather experience those things vicariously. Yes, cable TV.
It goes to the whole subject of Criminals as Celebrities. There have been outlaw heroes since the beginning of literature. Odysseus was an outlaw and a con man (ref Trojan Horse). Robin Hood was a freedom-fighting bandit. We would call him a terrorist today. William Tell. Our founding fathers donned war paint and vandalized ships in Boston Harbor. I imagine the British called them 'insurgents.' We loved Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde, Babyface Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd and every James Cagney character in the 1930's. They represented the spirit of defiance in the face of all odds in a time when the odds weren't too good for anybody. We made heroes of these people because they embodied our hopes and dreams and secret passions. They did the crime so we didn't have to do the time.
But gone are the days when crime had an element of nobility. Today we make television shows about scum-bags who wish they could commit statutory rape. I don't know if the bigger disGrace is that there is a show like To Catch a Predator in the first place or the fact that they seem to have no shortage of lonely/horny nut-cases auditioning for the lead role.
The Poet's Eye sees that we are living in a 'gotcha' world where at any moment we can expect for the camera crew to emerge from behind the curtains to record our every act of petty sin and drag us before the cathode Inquisition which burns us in order to save our souls. It's true. I saw it on cable TV.
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me lucifer
cause Im in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or Ill lay your soul to waste, um yeah
---Rolling Stones
