What hot television Vikings taught me about American inequality

One of the side effects of my nightly Lenten selah is that my television viewing has dwindled substantially. This isn't a bad thing, per se, because television viewing was beginning to feel oppressively mandatory. David Carr addressed this feeling a few weeks ago, concluding:

Television’s golden age is also a gilded cage, an always-on ecosystem of immense riches that leaves me feeling less like the master of my own universe, and more as if I am surrounded.

So taking my deliberate pause for reflection every night has not only helped me reacquaint myself with the dimly-recollected acts of stringing thoughts and words together for the sheer, profitless joy of it, it's also helped me slither through the bars of that gilded cage.

But I'm not wholly free of television. I always make the time for a handful of shows: Phil and I have wonderfully uneventful fortysomething Friday nights eating charcuterie and heckling the would-be moguls on Shark Tank; we watch Archer and Bob's Burgers within 24 hours of their broadcast; we're slowly working through this season of Justified. (Michael Rapaport is best in very small doses.)

And on my own, I watch Vikings. That show is far better than it has any right to be, which is something I also said about one of Michael Hirst's previous historic soaps, The Tudors. Both shows have much in common: Exquisite costuming that instantly creates a sense of a fundamentally different time and place; pacing that balances moments of tremendous emotional import with crazy, loud, alien-feeling violence; an approach to history that is fast and loose. They also invite the viewer to think on what an incredible thing civilization-building is, and how the modern mind as we live in it is really the culmination of a long chain of unpopular ideas bravely wielded by men and women.

Also, the actors and actresses are incredibly dishy. I can't emphasize this enough. (At left: I am a-twitter.)

Anyway, I really like Vikings, because it is a lot of fun to watch a show where the central premise is "When you are a man ahead of your time, you don't wait for people to catch up" and a supporting argument is "We will feature many, many, many well-muscled shirtless men with fantastic hair that suggests levels of virility that have not been seen since the Black Plague."

In the most recent episode, "Eye For An Eye," there is a scene where what passes for the Saxon intelligensia is meeting with King Ecbert to solve a recent civic problem, that problem being that holy shit, Vikings are really good at this raping and pillaging thing. Ecbert says coolly that he plans to negotiate with these guys, and he'll be doing that by exchanging high-status hostages. His submission? His son. (Who performs "history's" first documented spit-take on hearing this news, apparently for the first time.) Some fat bishop who will likely be speared by a Viking in the next few episodes protests that this tactic won't work because Vikings don't have anyone valuable to them, on account of them being terrifying subhuman savages.

Ecbert, proving that he is a man ahead of his time, calmly replies, "We are Christians, but not so long ago, we were also pagans. And, when we were pagans, do you think we cared nothing for our families? Our children?"

I watched Vikings this evening, and then I read an article on the disconnect between ministering to the poor in America and understanding the people to whom you're ministering. The author says:

From the outside, poverty is a lack of money that results from past choices and failure to plan. From inside, poverty is the diligent effort to love family and live securely, maybe even comfortably, with very little.

It strikes me that very often, people in this country who are poor are all lumped together as "The Poor," as if they are a monolithic bloc, a giant organism that's here to suck an actual individual dry of her resources, then turn its voracious maw toward the next innocent citizen.

It is easy to dehumanize "the poor." It is harder to think of them as people who love their children just as fiercely as the parent who's turned her life into a calendar grid of carpools and sports practices and homework help.

When I passed on the article to the nice pastor who's running my social justice study group, I asked, "I think this acknowledgment that poor people love as fiercely, as purely, as those who are comfortable leads to a question I am not sure how to answer: Why do we fear acknowledging the humanity of the poor?"

For me, I think, the answer is the flip side of the insight that Vikings character had: If we have to acknowledge our similarities, then we have to face the possibility that we are just as vulnerable, and we have to face a really frightening question: What are we afraid of losing, and why?

I don't know the answer. I think I may watch some TV and avoid the scary questions for tonight.

Comments

[DensityDuck]

"Why do we fear acknowledging the humanity of the poor?"

Because, as you point out, if the poor are the same as we are only with less money and less security, then does that mean that it's not actually possible for good decisions and valuable skills to mean anything?

This is not a "just world philosophy" thing, this is more like a question of nihilism. If it really is just luck, if it really truly does not matter what we do, then why bother doing anything?

[DensityDuck]

PS my wife and I also like watching "Shark Tank" and telling the people what to do.

"That's a good deal! Take it! OH GOD TAKE IT ALREADY!"

"That is the silliest idea I have ever seen, I award you no points, may God have mercy on your soul."

"I am gripped by a sudden uncontrollable urge to purchase nostril filters."

"Of course it's not a unique idea, Kevin, you ask that EVERY TIME and the answer is ALWAYS NO."

"This is, like, the son of Coppa Da Vino."

We should start a drinking game.

*Drink every time a pitch obviously had no hope of an investment but just wanted to get free advertising by being on Shark Tank.
*Drink every time a pitcher uses their kids as props.
*Drink every time the producers do a big human-interest intro bit that has, basically, nothing at all to do with the pitch.
*Drink every time a pitcher cries. (Drink twice if nobody invests.)
*Drink every time Mark drops out before the pitcher completes their first sentence.
*Drink every time Damon drops out of a food product because he's clearly afraid that he'd eat the inventory.
*Drink every time someone calls Kevin 'Mister Wonderful' and the producers cut in a reaction shot of him looking like he smelled a fart.
*Drink every time Kevin proposes a royalty deal and the other sharks bag on him.
*Drink every time Lori says "it's a great product and I really like it BUT..."
*Drink every time one of the sharks has an expression like they wish that the pitcher would spontaneously combust.