DAVID A. BRENSILVER is a newspaper editor, and a fellow ENC Press author.
During this week of Steve Irwin's well-publicized death, David's novel "ExecTV", (which is available through our publisher: http://www.encpress.com/TV.html) is more timely than ever. I highly recommend it.
I asked him to please put down his smokes and write a piece for the blog. He graciously agreed...
"The view from the Coliseum"
By David A. Brensilver
We are voyeurs all, would-be emperors growing big on a diet of what is fed us. We hunt no more, for we sit in our own Coliseums, watching our own devoured figuratively by the Kings of the Television Jungle, our appetites sated only briefly, for we know there is more to consume.
This week the world mourns what we are told is a great and terrible tragedy, the death of the so-called Crocodile Hunter who was taken from us while we were not watching. Steve Irwin was not to die like this. He was to die a slow, bloody death, watching his own limbs torn off by the very reptiles he so desperately wanted us to understand.
We understood, Mr. Irwin, and you knew that. You knew that images of you holding your infant son mere feet (meters in your case) from the jaws of a large and hungry crocodile would cause frustration disguised as outrage, frustration that some real and ugly tragedy did not befall your child before our high-definition eyes, damning you for providing the spectacular but not ourselves for watching.
You could have given us what we wanted but didn’t have the balls. Had you died the way we expected you eventually would, news and entertainment, or news-as-entertainment, would have synchronized as they are supposed to.
Still, the 24-hour cable television news outlets analyzed stingray behavior for us, just as they had John Mark Karr’s handwriting and the meal he was served during his flight from Thailand.
And just as you let us down by dying an unseen and unspectacular death, Mr. Karr let us down with his innocence. He is no choir boy, to be sure. But we prayed to the Kings of the Television Jungle that it was he who killed JonBenet a decade ago, and that it would be he upon whom we would levy our vengeance.
We would have watched as he was sentenced to death and we would have cheered the jury, for they would have represented we, the people, in our upholstered Coliseums, armed with the technology to rewind and replay the verdict as many times as our high-definition eyes and sound-byte-trained ears could stand.
Your execution would have been broadcast live, for all the world to see. The fruition of what we’ve been threatening to arrive at but haven’t had the balls: a return to public executions.
Your execution would have been news and it would have been entertainment – news-as-entertainment, the apotheosis of so-called Reality TV.
And until you were put down, we would have waited. Your legal defense team would have used familiar rhetoric to stir debate about your sentence and looked good doing so in high-definition. Experts would have been paraded onto 24-hour cable television news sets to talk about your impending execution and would have thrown a bone to conspiracy theorists by suggesting you looked so much like Lee Harvey Oswald that it couldn’t be coincidence.
And in the end, we would have watched one of our own get fed to the lions, while we imbibed the sweet elixir of schadenfreude in the comfort of our hard-wired Coliseums.
In David A. Brensilver’s ExecTV (ENC Press, 2005) Reality TV is brought to its logical extreme when an unemployed documentary filmmaker arranges to have an execution broadcast live, on pay-per-view television. Find out more about David, ExecTV, and ENC Press here: www.encpress.com
