Response to a blog post

What started out as an innocuous comment to a post on my good mate's blog Scratche's View on Everything (don't ask) has turned into a full-length response.

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Having never really entered the misty domain of reality TV, I can't make any comment with real authority.

However, I think you touch on a valid point when you question "how far we as people have really come". The superficiality and hypocrisy of the ruling New Left has come to signify this very point; that is, while lip service is given to, y'know, cosmopolitanism and all that jazz, nothing is being done about it.

But to suggest that there has been no attitude shift in American society is startling and in fact downright scary. I have never been to the "States" so I wouldn't know.

Actually, my view - again, just a hypothesis - would be that Obama, as black President, is viewed as an anomaly among your average white middle-classer, while he or she would count many average African-Americans among their friends.

I think the real issue here is one of money, not race. 

Your average Bachelor - and Bachelorette - will, as businesspeople, be doing alrightish. But more importantly, they're relatively obscure. (That's why they're on trash TV). They might be Supermen or Superwomen in their own community, but that's about it. In a way, capitalism has much more to answer to than segregationism - the latter was just an extreme part of the former. 

Your statement that "bi-racial relationships are common place and are on the most part met without a battered eye-lid" certainly seems valid. But that's the point, Elias. "Bi-racial relationships" are too common and suburbanistic to register with the reality TV set. Lets say that Household A watches The Bachelor &c. Household B, which is next door, is "biracial". What appeal is there in seeing real life played out on telly? Why not instead watch a show about a geriatric trying to hook up with a twentysomething broad? 

What also happens is that Household A goes about picking to death the fact that Obama was the first African-American President. Why don't we start aiming for the first Croatian-Hungarian-Egyptian-American-Jewish President? Ad infinitum....

What Household A should realise that their "first black President" was in fact picked by one of the most rigourous and testing democracies in the world. 

That's a side note. More importantly, you seem to lament the lack of social realism in reality shows. On the other hand, I endorse it. Because, y'know, it's a reality show, for crying out loud. Well, I would say in fact that it's a reality show, for crying out loud. The point is, at the end of the day, what we seeing on telly is an articial edit manipulated by producers determined to appease a particular demographic or sponsor. Therefore, the "reality" of the reality show becomes distorted, and by definition, untrue.

I empathise with your campaign of racial equality in all fields, but in this case, does the means justify the ends? Does campaigning to show "biracial relationships"  in the spectrum of reality - actually manufactured -  TV that important? Shouldn't more emphasis be placed in true fiction, where meaning is more abstract?

If I were in your shoes - and I thank God I'm not -  I would aim instead for equal representation - where inequalities did exist- in my - for want of a better word - sphere of influence rather than effect societal change through the means of the distant and uninviting Hollywood, which is what I interpret your blog post to be about.