Thursday, September 25, 2003

Evil


So, it’s over. Big Brother 4 crowned its big winner last night in a blaze of “who on earth cares anymore.” For those of us who watched more often than we’d care to admit, the final two hamsters left us cold, bored and angry that we had to stare at their lazy-ass selves. Their conversation for the past seven days consisted solely of puffing themselves up while shredding all those out of earshot -- and out of the country for that matter. It’s so easy to talk big and scary when the enemy is slurping martinis in Mexico. Predictably, none of the big talk and threats of “taking them down” happened when the sequestered walked back into the house. Feh. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, little girls.

Equally predictable, the voting was lopsided, resulting in a 6-1 vote for Jun (Note: Nate? Your vote and your logic were as misguided as your fashion selection of the dreaded pirate shirt. Dump the shirt. Dump the girl). During the vote, the phrase that kept rearing its ugly head was choosing between “the lesser of two evils.” Oy.

One thing that really bugs about the few reality shows I watch is the running of certain phrases into the ground. It gets to the point that you want to throttle the people and threaten the prize money unless they can come up with something original to say. Some of BB4’s biggest offenders:

I’ve got your back -- Chopping block -- Alliance / Secret Alliance -- Floater -- Honor – Veto – Dude -- My Girl / Donny -- Cuss Words used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and interjections repeatedly in the same sentence.

So they had to choose between the lesser of two evils. A Jewish proverb reads He is not called wise who knows good and ill, but he who can recognize the two evils the lesser. I’d call the sequestered hamsters an awful lot of names, but I guarantee you “wise” wouldn’t be one of them. And if you’re choosing between the lesser of two evils, don't you have to apply some sort of standard to each evil in order to assess them? Would it be a moral standard? Despite Jee’s mantra of “Honor”, I see a “moral” label having the same fortitude as Jun's diet in a Doritos factory. If not a moral standard, do you suppose a legal standard would apply? For many of this crew (see: Gary and Dr. Blue, among others) a legal standard wouldn’t have a pegleg to stand on.

So what’s left? Like most competitions, there is going to be a degree of subjectivity in the choice. You wore elephant slippers? I hate elephants. You wore blue? My favorite grade school teacher wore blue. Is it really choosing between evils, or is it making a decision based on our myriad of life experiences tinged by whether or not the toast was burned in the morning?

Someone mentioned last night the saying that Kent offered when making his choice in BB2. He said something to the effect of “It is like choosing between a hangnail and a rash.” Now that is what I call wisdom.

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