I have been known to use this pulpit as a confessional of
sorts. Why do you think I do this? Am I, at heart, some kind of
exhibitionist? I hope you don’t think
so. The truth is that I want to expose
common foibles by noting that I am as guilty of them as you might be…maybe
more! If I have the courage to admit my idiosyncrasies
and tell how I’m working on them, then maybe you will have the courage to admit
your own to yourselves…and begin to work on them.
So, what is tonight’s
confession? Here goes…I have taken to
watching, and planning my day around, The Bold and the Beautiful. Four-thirty every afternoon on Channel
Ten. And on those days when I miss it,
there’s a reprise broadcast the next morning at seven-thirty.
Yes, your rabbi
watches the soaps – or at least, one soap in particular – regularly. I’m completely fascinated by the show, whose
meandering plot unfolds day after day at a near-glacial pace. And what a plot! Everybody in three large families is
connected by marriages, divorces, betrayals, bed-shifting, incest, and cradle-robbing. Sex, sex, and more sex! Everybody works in the high-powered fashion
industry. Yet nobody ever seems to be
working! They spend their time creating interpersonal
drama. For all that, they clearly are
paid well. The women are dripping in
jewels, the men in expensive boy toys. All
live in magnificent homes, dine out all the time and travel extensively.
I remember when, as
a boy, I first heard the term ‘Soap Opera’ applied to such programs. My mother patiently explained to me that the ‘soap’
comes from their sponsorship by soap companies.
Such companies as Colgate and Palmolive, before they became
Colgate-Palmolive. Procter and Gamble. And the ‘opera’ part of the phrase refers to
the melodramatic quality of their plots.
Maybe you’re
wondering just why I feel that I must apologise for having become a devotee of
this program. If so, I’ll tell you that
I’ve always harboured a certain contempt for those who are. Years ago, in the USA I remember reading
about how there was an ‘epidemic’ of devotion to those daytime soaps on
university campuses. I remember
questioning the value of higher education if that’s what students had time for,
and were drawn to. Having left school
before finishing my degree and having completed it through off-duty courses and
testing, I began to feel acquitted for the way I’d spent my early adult years.
And now here I am,
fascinated by this slowly-unfolding melodrama played out in half-hour daily
instalments on daytime TV.
Everybody is
familiar with the declaration that art imitates life, which originates
with Aristotele. And perhaps also with
its antithesis, life imitates art, whose source is an 1889 essay by
Oscar Wilde. The question is: which one is more correct? I think the latter, at least in our day and
age. Look at the eternal popularity of
the soaps. And then look at how people
you know, tend to play out their lives as an ever-unfolding melodrama – similar
to the soaps’ plots.
So I have spent a
number of hours of my life, hours that I will never get back, watching The
Bold and the Beautiful. What could I
possibly have learned from it? I mean,
if I’m standing in front of you on Friday night and talking about it, there has
to be a lesson in it…doesn’t there? Never fear; there is!
The characters in The
Bold and the Beautiful are mostly good people with good intentions. And yet they repeatedly hurt one another as
they live out their dramas. So why do
they live their lives as scripted melodramas, if it hurts people who are
dear to them? Because they are driven
by the excitement of the drama. Instead
of accepting that most of life is calm and even boring, the drama is like a
drug. Once hooked on it, one needs more
and more. And because it is like a drug,
one is unlikely to be able to own up one’s dependence upon it.
We can see this
quality in ordinary human discourse. People
who are essentially good, with good intentions, engaging in dramas that are
hurtful to others. But the drama itself becomes
a driving force where the actors are unable to see what they are doing. And thus they hurt one another. But there are no gains whatsoever to be had. At the end of the day, there is only hurt to
spread around. But those addicted to the
drama cannot see it, any more than most alcoholics can be honest about their addiction.
The radio
personality – and bestselling author – Dennis Prager offers insight into the
nature of evil in our world. He
observes, most accurately, that the majority of evil in the world is introduced
by people who mean well. We already know
this principle from the cliché: The
road to hell is paved with good intentions. Prager meant to apply it to the macro, where
great utopian movements are founded by those with good intentions yet cause much
suffering. But it is also true in the
micro sense, where we see people hurting those they love or at least regard
highly, with their interpersonal dramas.
In The Bold and
the Beautiful, everybody is fabulously wealthy. But in real life, we all struggle to one
degree or another to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. Why doesn’t that stark difference serve, as it
might, to help us to differentiate our own lives from those fantasy lives on
TV? Adrian Cronauer, of Good Morning
Vietnam fame, once helped me to see why.
He told me about the intense jockeying for position that he’d observed
as an enlisted man in the US Air Force. He
told me this very matter-of-factly, but I filed it away as a profound
truth: “The competition is most fierce
when there’s so little at stake.”
If we look at the dramas that we see people we know playing out, we can
see this principle in action. When the
stakes are low, the backbiting only seems to increase. One might think that to be counter-intuitive. But the truth is that, in life, the modesty
of resources does not diminish the melodrama.
The stakes in our
lives are lower, at least in the material sense, than those in the lives of the
characters on The Bold and the Beautiful. But in reality, by being lower they are actually
higher. Economics is, at its heart, the
science that explores the consequences of the scarcity of resources. Interpersonal drama is a lot like
economics. At its heart it is all about
competition for resources of a different kind. Some of those resources are intangibles: things like love and self-esteem. But the drama hides an essential truth. Such resources are not limited; they
are available in abundance! The quest
for such things, is not a zero-sum game.
But turning it into a zero-sum game adds excitement. And is therefore something that we do,
despite its being counter-intuitive.
Like Brooke Logan Forrester,
played by Katherine Kelly Lang. Her
particular drama is a subplot this week, on The Bold and the Beautiful. She has been away in Italy for some
months. Having returned to LA, she finds
that three different men – Ridge Forrester, Bill Logan, and Deacon Sharpe –
with whom she has had relationships in the past are now committed to other
women. Brooke, unable to cope with this,
is falling into alcohol abuse to bury the hurt.
The watcher awaits what drama Brooke will create to provide the succour she
needs. Her mistake is the zero-sum
fallacy. She is busy competing with
others for ‘limited’ resources – the men she already knows and with whom she
has already had relationships and children.
This, instead of looking for love in new places, with the new people she
would surely meet if she were trying.
If we could see this
and other fallacies hidden by the drama of such programs as The Bold and the
Beautiful, perhaps we could see how we create real-life drama based on
fallacies. And then we would be able to
rise above such dramas and relate to one another. And assuming goodness of intentions, we would
also see goodness of results. I expose
these fallacies for this purpose only.
That we would learn to recognise, and therefore transcend them. Shabbat shalom.
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