‘Kidnapped’ by Drivel, We Invite World Hatred

When you watch a show like “Fear Factor,” NBC’s latest offering in shock reality TV, in which contestants bob for chicken feet in a vat of live maggots, eat pig rectums and swim in pools of rotting squid, you begin to realize at least part of the reason why the great foreign “they” hate us so much.

Who in the developing world, where suffering and deprivation are daily bread, wouldn’t hate a people so bored, so creatively resourceless and so overprivileged that they need to manufacture fake torment for mass public consumption?

Not real torment, mind you, because uncoached, unscripted trials would, of course, be too much like art to make it into prime time. After all, the original “Survivor” could have been like “Lord of the Flies.” But with its airbrushed contestants paddling around in the tide pools of their own vapidity and sophomorically interacting in prefab scenarios unworthy of a sitcom, we got instead an unfunny “Gilligan’s Island.”

The most profound parts of these silly people’s real lives play like such bad fiction that you want to shout “Rewrite!” just as they’re tearfully confronting on national TV the cardboard traumas of their obscenely sheltered lives.

I want to shoot these people on sight, so it’s not hard to imagine how your average struggling Punjabi, who would no doubt consider boredom itself a privilege, feels about our sanitized shenanigans. He may not be watching NBC, but he’s getting the gist of our pop culture from relatives who live here or through his local propagandists to make the point. They don’t have to doctor our signal much to damn us. We do it ourselves and then some. Our pastimes must seem like the petty devilry of an unworthy people who, by sheer accident of birth, exercise the grotesque prerogative of whiling away their lives in shallow distractions.

The injustice, the vulgarity is monstrous.

These days, what makes the raunchy adolescent stunts of “Fear Factor” and its ABC rival “The Chair” all the more tasteless is the real ordeal that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is undergoing in Pakistan--that is if he hasn’t been murdered. The whereabouts and identities of his kidnappers, who claim to be members of the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, are unknown. After abducting Pearl in Karachi, the captors sent threatening e-mails to the news media, including pictures of Pearl with a gun to his head.

Still, here we are at home, gleefully consuming drivel such as MTV’s new game show “Kidnapped,” in which contestants pretend to be hostages and are interrogated about nothing more substantive than their friends’ unexamined lives. Whoever loses is submitted to mock tortures such as having scorpions dumped on his head or having to eat chocolate-covered worms.

Meanwhile, back on “Fear Factor,” we have the likes of chesty Chad, a recent “winner,” making the following sage pronouncement on the human condition as he waited to see if he had won the $50,000 prize for which he had happily humiliated himself: “I thought I knew what stress was. But this is stress.”

It’s sad and unjust that a talented journalist who was making a constructive contribution to this nation’s role in a global crisis has to suffer for his country’s imagined sins while airheads with nothing better to do give us all a bad name doing party tricks for fast cash.

While Pearl’s pregnant wife waits for news of her husband’s fate, we who enjoy the luxury of freedom blithely change the channel, preferring to laugh, squeal and gawk at soulless frippery.