Lord of entertainment

"A controversial US reality TV show involving children is due to get its first airing on the CBS network.

Kid Nation takes 40 children, some as young as eight, to an abandoned New Mexico desert town where they are left to fend for themselves for 40 days.

The youngsters are meant to create a functioning society with a system of laws, commerce and even a class system.

Critics see the show as a modern version of Lord of the Flies with a Wild West twist."
BBC News

There's a few things that disturbs me about this prospect. Not that children are being apparently left to "fend for themselves" -- somehow I doubt that anyone will starve, or come to any serious harm. But I am disconcerted that they are apparently meant to create "a class system". Why on earth are we encouraging children to create a class system? Forget everyone being equal or any of those other liberal myths our children are brainwashed in the schools -- "Remember kids, some people are just better than others -- and they need to be kept in their place".

I'm amused that they are supposed to create a functioning society -- I guess the key word there is "functioning"; if all they manage is to create a society with great divides between rich and poor and where the majority work for the benefit of the few, well nobody said it was meant to be a perfect society.

And finally, does anyone else who has read Lord of the Flies think it is a colossally bad idea to emulate it? It isn't like they all sat around, holding hands and signing kum-bah-yah -- it was a book about "the darkness of man's heart" and although in some ways Golding was a cretin and had some abhorrent ideas about original sin and 'savagery', at no point do you think it would be a good idea to recreate it.

Wouldn't it have been safer to recreate Lord of the Rings, or failing that the Lord of the Dance? Both are pretty violent in their own way, and with homosexual subtexts -- but I don't think either featured human sacrifice.

I was going to end this post with a choice quote from my favourite anarchist, Edward Abbey. But I have decided instead to take a different approach -- I think this is quite apt:

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." - Hunter S. Thompson