No, we’re not talking about George Orwell’s fictional dystopia, we’re talking about the full-on silly CBS “reality show” Big Brother. In case you’ve never seen it, it’s a case of a bunch of people live in a house together, having their every moment videotaped, and they vote each other off one by one. It naturally breeds an atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria, and people lie and backstab inside and outside of the alliances that they form.
It’s become almost a matter of folk wisdom that you’re never going to get ahead in this game by playing it honorably–the people being straightforward and trying to do what is right end up being booted out in the first few weeks because they trust their “friends” and don’t campaign for themselves when they need to. And the most crooked players often justify their actions saying, “I’m just playing the game,” which statement is often backed up when the jury votes between the final two, as they choose the most deceitful player because they’re “an awesome game player”. Whereas a player who made sure not to call attention to oneself and is generally straight-up about things is told that he or she played a poor game by “flying under the radar” and so on.
Not that I want to get too in-depth about the reality show (as you can tell, it’s one of my guilty pleasures), but I wanted a point of reference here. You see, as I’ve been thinking about it, it seems apparent to me that the way that American society is trending, culturally, may well lead us to actually try to fight our wars the way that we watch people play Big Brother. And I’m actually a little worried that we may already be there, though the military is still playing the part of the straightforward, dumb (usually military) well-intentioned person who gets booted out in the first couple episodes because he or she thought that being a decent human being and carving out a caretaking role in the house would cement his or her neededness there. The no-nonsense approach infuriates people who would prefer a more “sensitive” or “nuanced” approach (read: tell you what you want to hear to your face, and tell the next person what they want to hear even if it completely contradicts what you just said), and then they conduct campaigns against the well-intentioned straightforward person and oust them.
Well, isn’t that approximately how we think we can play the War on Terror these days? The general Joe or Jane Schmo in the American public is growing tired of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. “We got rid of Saddam ages ago,” they complain, “so what are we still doing over there?”
When the military, or the president, or other such straightforward people mention that we should honor our promises and clean up the mess that we left there, because it’s the right thing to do, J. Schmo becomes agitated. “You’re not being sensitive to my needs,” he/she says. “What about what I want?”
Never mind that we, the American people, are about as spoiled and pampered a people as probably have ever existed in the history of the world (aristocrats in some historical eras may have had it better, but they were a minute portion of their various environments), and what J. Schmo might consider a “need” is cheap gas for his or her gas-guzzler, whereas the average Iraqi might be contending a lot lower down on the hierarchy, hoping for, say, water, electricity, maybe a school for their kids?
I digress. My point is that we’re getting perilously close to feeling that the contracts that you enter upon dealing with other countries are as inconsequential as “alliances” on Survivor or Big Brother, where it’s de rigeur to sell out your alliance whenever the numbers might work better for you, and people think less of you for sticking with an alliance that you started out with.
If some people in our country had their way, we’d be saying that about Iraq. “We changed our mind,” they’d be saying, in effect, to the people there. “You’re on your own because we’re tired of mucking around in the ditches with you.” Then we could turn our backs on them, pat ourselves on the backs because now we’re free to enjoy our movies and lattes and gas-guzzlers again, and leave the entire Middle East to disintegrate into an Islamo-fascist superstate that will make us have to deal with it.
Which, if you replace the nations with people, would make a really great Big Brother plot.
Posted by Kjirstin 
