Barnard Weinraub has an article in the 3/4/04 issue of The New York Times -- "UPN Show Is Called Insensitive to Amish" -- that reports that Viacom is producing a reality show for UPN (a sister network to CBS) that will make fun of the Amish on national television. (This link may require registration.)
The show, called "Amish in the City," will feature Amish teenagers brought into the big city; the "fun" would be in watching their reactions to the "sinful" and shocking aspects of modern urban life.
You may remember that CBS already tried to do a reality show called "Hillbillies" in which rural young people were going to be given the same treatment in Beverly Hills. That show was put on the back burner because of public outrage.
The article in The New York Times said:
"Herman Bontrager, secretary-treasurer of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, a group of lawyers, ministers and academics who support the Amish, said there are about 200,000 Amish in the nation, mostly in eastern Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and northern Indiana. 'The Amish are probably more knowledgeable about the world than the CBS and UPN people give them credit for,' said Mr. Bontrager, an insurance executive from New Holland, Pa., who grew up Amish and is now a Mennonite.
"Mr. Bontrager said emphatically over the phone, 'I just find it reprehensible that corporations, especially media corporations in this country, would find it acceptable to make a mockery of a religious group. They just plain don't get it. For Amish people, their religious faith and everyday living are totally intertwined.'"
I grew up as a Mennonite (Amish are related to Mennonites); so I can comment: the problem, here, is actually not just caused by "corporations"; the problem is caused by companies run by the media elites of Hollywood. We could say that the media people comprise the production staff for the pop culture machine of contemporary America. In general, these people are extreme-leftists, cynical, disrespectful of tradition and traditional people, and have NO sense of the sacred.
I know this because I came from a rural Mennonite community in the 1960's as a young man. I went to the big city (Los Angeles and Hollywood) to explore and taste the pleasures of the modern megalopolis. Today I live in Burbank.
I finally grew up. But I don't consider the experience merely amusing.
There is a flash and energy to the big city that is exhilarating. Arts flourish there like nowhere else. But that's not how it advertises itself....
The temptation of the avant-gaard lures rural youth into Beat, hippie, or urban punk culture -- or just into the general big-city freedom -- with ferocity. It promises much. The emptiness and disappointment that follows upon the years, chews up idealism. It's discovered eventually that there is a lack of real community among city "progressives," that urban sophisticates have a shallow maturity, and that narcissism itself is passed off by the urban milieu as "wisdom."
I'm quite outraged that Hollywood would pick a peaceful and religiously devout people of integrity -- the Amish -- for public amusement. This is another example of liberal arrogance. This is part of the reason we have a culture war.
Posted by Rick Penner at March 5, 2004 01:23 AM