October 2005

Editor's Page:

Beach to boardroom, our members are hard at it

by Lindsay Thompson

Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.
— T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

One of the interesting things about editing is there is always something new turning up as a potential story.

Lately, I find myself having to pay attention to Popular Culture in ways I wouldn’t have if left to my own devices. Popular Culture seems to be divided between good bits that conduce to the general uplift of society and morals; the bad bits demand congressional action and the reshaping and repurposing of the courts.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell on what side of the ledger things should fall. For example, former Congressman Ben Jones, who played Cooter on the bubbasploitation television series The Dukes of Hazzard, has denounced this summer’s movie version as a betrayal of the wholesomeness and family values of the original small-screener.

This year, in your service, I had to take up watching reality TV.

My previous experience of the genre was limited and dated. I watched the first season of Survivor in 2000. It was so Robinson Crusoe meets Thomas Hobbes. And I heckled the kids in the Seattle edition of The Real World.

2005, however, brought reality TV into Bar News’s focus when I read that two lawyers from Washington were cast in Survivor and The Apprentice.

For the uninitiated, Survivor strands a dozen and a half or so folks on an island and leaves them there to alternate between living off of rice, rats, snakes, fish, and the occasional crate of Pringles; and running, jumping, and climbing trees in games that turn them against each other and force them into increasingly devious stratagems of attrition. They vote each other off until one is left, and the last one wins a million dollars.

The Apprentice strands about the same number of people on the island of Manhattan. We don’t get much of a sense of what they eat, but otherwise they occupy a funhouse world intelligently designed by the godlike business tycoon Donald Trump. He sets them off on little business projects that turn them against each other and force them into increasingly devious stratagems of attrition. Then Trump votes them off until one is left. The winner gets a job in one of the Trump companies.

Each show is, in its own way, a hard slog to sit through. On Survivor you get treated to long stretches of beachfront ennui and inter-hammock gossip. Wardrobe requirements are minimal, so the casting skews toward the Highly Decorative.

The Apprentice subjects viewers to three truly modern horrors: the contestants’ competing power suit wardrobes (which, astonishingly, fit into one tiny roller bag when the fired have to cross the Lobby of Shame to their taxi into -exile); the unspeakable over-the-topness of Trump’s sense of interior decoration; and The Donald’s mesmerizing combover. All the contestants are quite young.

In Palau, lawyer Willard gave a good account of himself in the various competitions, but commented, after being voted off, he was surprised that being fit as he could be for his age, it wasn’t quite enough. He also got portrayed as a bit of a grump, which I attributed to film editors in need of storylines.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, lawyer Alex had a sort of action-figure website as an adjunct to the show, and seemed like a golden boy until he began to run aground in a project designing and selling pizza on the street. But he hung on to nearly the end, despite a remarkable level of escalating boardroom backbiting as contestants decreased. Even getting the short end of Trump’s famed, “You’re fired!,” I’d say Alex escaped the worse fate of actually getting a job understudying the master.

The Culture Beat moves on. It turns out there are WSBA members serving as news analysts on cable news shows now. I’m steeling myself for more research.    

For personal correspondence, Lindsay Thompson can be reached at tradelaw@hotmail.com. E-mail letters to the editor to letterstotheeditor@wsba.org or mail to WSBA, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 2101 Fourth Ave., Ste. 400, Seattle, WA 98121-2330.