It's true that I watch Reality TV, but not Flavor of Love.
It is Bear Gylls that has me nailed to the tube after a week away from the Tivo. He's an ex-special forces Brit who parachutes into some wilderness and then gives himself five days to make it back to civilization. Along the way he gives us all kinds of lessons in survival that we might use if we were somehow stranded on the lava beds of Kilauea or lost in the rain forest of Costa Rica. It's highly entertaining to watch he dig for grubs and eat them as he weathers the horrors of the wild.
I've seen him eat snakes both raw and cooked. I've seen him eat termites, ants, maggots and worms. I've watched him hit a rabbit with a boomerang stick at 10 yards. I've seen him freak out in his lean-to in the middle of the night on the possibility that there might be a grizzly in the area. I've seen him retch in the rain, boil his drinking water, navigate rapids without a boat, (barely) climb out of a crevasse in a glacier, and actually jump through ice into a frozen lake to demonstrate the effects of hypothermia. I've seen him make fires about 4 different ways and make beds in snow, river rock, pine needles and just plain dirt. I've seen him navigate by stars, by an improvised sundial and by following streams. He has faced angry elephants, hippo and fer de lances. I watched him get bucked off a wild horse he tried to tame and get dizzy from volcanic sulfur dioxide gas. I've even seen his shoes catch fire.
I've never heard him explain why.
Presumably, this is all done for our benefit. We eco-tourists do tend to get a little off track sometimes. It is very useful to know that in Costa Rica you can drink the water but in the Sierra Nevada you should not and that on the savanna you should look for high ground instead of low. But the more I watch this guy, the more I think how doofy it is to expect anything romantic about the wilderness in the first place. It's brutal out there, and I have no need to test my manhood against the elements. I would guess the millions in my league of couch potatoes are thinking the same thing. Who is this loony Brit and what's he going to try next? But more than that, what is the value in all this?
Now it's true that I can remember working with a particularly nebbish looking consultant from Andersen back in Connecticut. He totally redeemed himself in my eyes by revealing that he was an ice climber. I grew up in Southern Cal and have been a card carrying member of the Sierra Club. I've climbed Whitney twice. Once the front way and once the back way. And I've done enough hiking to the top of mountains in my youth so that I had to be convinced that skiing was anything but the stupidest, laziest idea known to man. I've even climbed a rock face or two and bodysurfed in 10 foot waves. But that's about the extent of my daredeviltry. If I ever had a desire to continue on that arc, it was halted by reading 'Into Thin Air' by Jon Krakauer. Climbing Everest is an outer expression of an inner compulsion. I have an inner bhudda. Maybe that's why I'm getting fat.
Yet, I understand and am sympathetic to this aspect of manhood. We have to conquer our minds and will and demonstrate that by the proofs of putting our bodies at risk. The moment of facing the pain and the fear in the face of foolish defeat is truly mentally liberating. I can still remember that moment in my life. Fortunately it only came at the cost of a knee capable of running long distances rather than an arm or a leg. There is something very powerful about taking one's own life into one's hands.
This level of self-mastery has many expressions, and I'm afraid that out here in California, leaders of Western culture that we are, we've gone a bit too extreme. Another reality show I don't watch is 'Stunt Junkies'. I'm prone to laugh derisively at the nut-crunching pratfalls of skateboard rail-grinders. Dumbass! This is what we've been reduced to, the whoop of a 360, the meaning of which is entirely disconnected from any civilized virtue. It's all vanity I say. Being on the Pacific Rim, you might think we would entertain a bit more Aikido or Yoga, and we do a fair bit of martial arts, but the depth of that discipline is wasted in our culture. For us it's all about nailing the trick, busting the move and even in martial arts breaking the brick or taking it in the 'nads.
I think Grylls is an admirable fellow, and I'd certainly want him on my team. You know he has good taste in watches, knives and the like. However there is something great lost in our culture that I think is slipping away, or is at least confined to the margins, and that is the tightness of virtue and prowess. In another time I might have called it, after Mishima, the unity of pen and sword. But this time around I think my appreciation is a bit more subtle. It is the virtue of strength and courage without the effeminate and vain pomposity that attends most of our celebrities. And I believe that it is that corruption of our core that makes the kind of testing Grylls demonstrates necessary if only to remind us of what we're missing that causes us to 'adventure'.
We're missing civilization, or more properly, we are missing our appreciation of civilization. One premise of 'Man vs Wild' is If it takes Grylls more than five days to find another human being the deal is off. It's one of those artificial deadlines that increases the drama of such reality series, but you must admit it's a bit more serious than not being able to weld the tank on the next custom motorcycle in time. It's also a clue as to how fast one can get on or off the grid of civilization. But within the span of those five days, minus Grylls' combat survuval skills, we'd be reduced to blithering idiots, if not dead ones. It's something we should keep in mind the next time we complain about taxes, politics, work or the quality of food on airplanes.
Recent Comments