The Reality Reality Show
19
assignment seriously—as I always did and, perhaps, still too much do. I found
out that our national tune was written by a British man and was actually likely
German in origin. And that it had—perhaps unsurprisingly—been lifted from a
beer-drinking song. Furthermore, the tune was already adopted as the national
anthem of Luxembourg. I pointed out, during our assemblies and before the
cameras that documented our debates, how the l yrics were all about war, and
with the scars of Vietnam so fresh, perhaps it was time for a song celebrating
peace, celebrating all of the positive contributions we had made to the world and
could make to the world. I pointed to Francis Scott Key’s own questionable
background and even brought in the aesthetic question of how hard it is to sing a
song covering a range of an octave and a fifth. I made the case the best I could
and presented it to the assembled student body, the camera crew, and the
invisible audience we all imagined watching us at home.
By the second day my school locker had been vandalized. Later that week
someone wrote “Commie!” in black permanent marker across the top of my
homeroom desk. During lunch someone tripped me and I spilled my food all
over the cafeteria floor. After one week, a couple of hours before the big vote, I
was just looking forward to it all being over, hanging out at recess near the edge
of the field behind the playground. That’s when someone threw a rock. It hit me
between the eyes, smashing my glasses, cutting me badly.
I am lying on the ground, bleeding. I’ve been hit, and I’m not sure if anyone
will be coming for me—either to help me or to finish me off. There’s noise
everywhere. My eye sockets fill with blood causing me to panic further, thinking
I’ve been blinded. In the chaos I stay on the ground, bleeding, broken, sure that I
am dying. And all I can think about is why the cameraman is just watching
instead of helping me. It was to be a reality show about democracy, about
children enacting democracy. Have I failed the show? Have I failed democracy?
Has none of this been about democracy or reality from the very start? There had
been no communal discussion of what our common good was on this rather silly
issue, merely radical individualism—and some of the most radical individuals
clearly had rocks. The whole “democratic reality exercise” suddenly seemed a
set-up. Those in power had chosen others to be in power to shape the issues for
us. I was a lackey, a stooge presenting the position of the ruling class to the
masses. But clearly what would supposedly make this all democratic was that
we would vote. Voting, though, was a question of indoctrination. Each
individual voting was a way of legitimizing whatever outcome was reached.
Looking back on grade school, all of the important decisions had always already
been decided. The options were carefully chosen by those in power to limit the
potential outcomes exactly as they wanted. They invoked democracy and voting
to give an air of justness to the proceedings, but the people themselves were not
ruling themselves.
Still: how we love to celebrate the idea that anyone can become famous and
thus important in this country, and how voting somehow makes it all legitimate.