When a group of kids is stranded and charged with creating their own society, there’s a very real chance it will result in the death of the fat, bespectacled kid named Piggy.
That’s half of the allure of stranding them—to see whether our golden ones will sprout horns and jam one another’s heads onto stakes—while we watch, because we like to be entertained. It’s not entirely unlike betting on pit bulls in a ring, except that the latter is horrifying and uncalled for.
CBS’ Kid Nation, which adds cash prizes and a TV audience to the basic idea of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, doesn’t air until September 19 but has already drawn the kind of controversy that guarantees viewers:
Clearly the parents of these children are ogres, willing to rent out their offspring for $5,000 to $20,000 and the promise of celebrity. The downside might be catapulting a child into national humiliation or finding out he’s been shipped to the medic after drinking bleach on the set, as was the reported case with four children, but ... the promise of celebrity.
While I was mulling over what type of society Kid Nation’s 40 8-to-15-year-olds would create—Bentham’s utilitarian cornucopia of goodwill; Baghdad; some god-awful situation where each person holes up with a computer and communicates with a made-up profile?—the answer became as obvious as the mobile prostitution billboard driving around next to me: Pop culture’s children will create Vegas. Because theoretically, pop culture, also known in its concentrated form as “Vegas,” created them. Little, id-run them.
Thus, the show will start with a heinous mini-Britney performance, followed much trashing of heinous mini-Britney performance by vacuous mini-media—did you see her paunch?!—and then everyone will get drunk and shake their booty on the desert floor. Were you expecting the United Nations? I mean, even if we were going to expect an exploited-children’s version of politics, we’d need to be prepped for short-stuff imitations of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig—politics as we know it. Word is, there’s a staff psychologist on the other side of the Kid Nation cameras; would that there were the same amenity available at the taping of C-SPAN.
So, shortly after work gets started in the deserted New Mexico town where there are child labor laws (did I mention the giant prostitution ad driving next to me in a city where prostitution is illegal?), perhaps by Episode 2, stars of Survivor: Children of the Porn will have established the order of things: The pretty ones should be in charge.
Oh, I’m kidding. Everyone knows that pretty is just good for money, not leadership. So the ones with the least cumbersome ethics will be in charge. They will create the governing bodies—like a County Commission, perhaps—and a couple of strip clubs, maybe in the same building, but definitely, definitely, not from co-mingling funds or conflicts of interest.
If there’s anything our kids should know by the tenor of the pop culture we’ve provided them, it’s that everything revolves around the strip pole except politics. So by Episode 3, the 18 young females in Kid Nation will hone their disrobing skills. But not in a bad way, because they will find it empowering. And it will tighten their abs. Actually, 16 of them will be strippers, and two will be showgirls, who will flank the drunk kid/mayor.
Episodes 4 and 5 may wander off into small diversions where the less compelling characters say boring things about economic diversification or social welfare, and ratings will temporarily plunge, and their parents will be mortified, and a CBS executive will get pink-slipped, and we’ll all be glad he did because look what he did to the poor boring kids. Sooner than later, though, a couple of dimpled youths who have a future will bring things back on course by getting in a bloody, somebody-gets-wrongly arrested, there-are-racial-overtones fight, and all of America will be siding with one or the other, and it’ll take Katie Couric’s perma-stretched expressions to put it all in useful perspective.
Treacherous, adolescence is.
Wonder if we’ll ever grow out of it?