"Make-Over" TV shows & Iraq reconstruction.

[bloom]

Have you been watching the various "Make-Over" shows?

FSTV showed a Naomi Klein speech and she was pointing out how practically simultaneously with the obliteration & occupation of Iraq - Americans have been watching on their TV's all of these shows (The Swan, Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, others). Where you have the passive participant who cooperates with the "experts" who come in totally remake your face or remake your wardrobe or your house or whatever. (Oprah also loves doing this stuff). And then all the passive participant has to do is act overjoyed at the end.

I haven't been watching them - it seems like a stupid idea to me. I like to be my own decision-maker as far my surroundings go and I don't think I need remade anyway.

I think it's such an interesting phenomena - that these types of shows are going on - blossoming - while the US gov't is working on remaking Iraq. Bombing the crap out of it and then going in with the experts - Haliburton and Bechtel - and acting like they are going to remake the country into something wonderful.

Of course they haven't been doing a very good job and the country doesn't want outsiders to remake it anymore than I would welcome outside "experts" to remake me.

[Not_Giving_Up]

1. I don't watch those shows....I have better ways to spend my time

I really don't get the obsession. The only thing I can figure is that the people who religiously watch these shows are unsatisfied with their current surroundings/looks, but can't afford to do anything about it. So, they live vicariously through the show.

[Larkspur]

2. I liked Trading Spaces and While You Were Out

I'm renovating my house and sometimes I get good ideas from these shows to use on my house.

[bloom]

3. ....

[bloom]

4. From Naomi ->

The one crane I saw in the streets of Baghdad was hoisting an advertising billboard. One of the surreal things about Baghdad is that the old city lies in ruins, yet there are these shiny new billboards advertising the glories of the global economy. And the message is: “Everything you were before isn’t worth rebuilding.” We’re going to import a brand-new country. It is the Iraq version of the “Extreme Makeover.”

It’s not a coincidence that Americans were at home watching this explosion of extreme reality television shows where people’s bodies were being surgically remade and their homes were being bulldozed and reconstituted. The message of these shows is: Everything you are now, everything you own, everything you do sucks. We’re going to completely erase it and rebuild it with a team of experts. You just go limp and let the experts take over. That is exactly what “Extreme Makover:Iraq” is.

There was no role for Iraqis in this process. It was all foreign companies modernizing the country. Iraqis with engineering Ph.D.s who built their electricity system and who built their telephone system had no place in the reconstruction process.

If we want to know what the goals of the war are, we have to look at what Paul Bremer did when he first arrived in Iraq. He laid off 500,000 people, 400,000 of whom were soldiers. And he shredded Iraq’s constitution and wrote a series of economic laws that the The Economist described as “the wish list of foreign investors.”

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0505-23.htm