Kid Nation of Capitalistic Pigs

As I watched Kid Nation last night I was amazed by the absurdity of the show. Prior to the airing of the pilot, most criticism of the show revolved around whether it was appropriate for children to be “working” in such a manner. I watched the show not really believing that CBS would ever put the kids in any real danger, but I was wrong. The whole point of the show was to see how children would build a society without the influence of adults. Kid Nation could not be further removed from this concept. What the kids experienced is not an opportunity to develop their own society but an exercise in brainwashing them to become better consumers. It reminded me of the type of capitalist propaganda that would appear as a warning of the future in sf books like 1984 or A Brave New World.

The appointed leaders were told to read their instructions when they reached town, but being kids, promptly forgot to follow these directions. So, for the first two days the kids worked as one cohesive team. Jobs were divided according to who was best able to accomplish a given task. When some of the smaller kids didn’t get anything to eat, the majority of the others spoke out about the need to insure that the weakest were given their fair share. What we were witnessing was children going down the bumpy road to egalitarian society. And it was beautiful.

But this was not the show the producers had in mind. Since the leaders forgot about the instructions they were supposed to read on Day 1, the producers reminded them. Did these instructions offer sage advice on better ways to develop their microcosm of society? Just the opposite. The producers ordered this group of kids that were pulling together and operating in everyone’s best interest, to divide up into competing groups. They wanted to destroy the “Together We Stand, Divided We Fall” attitude and turn their society into “Us versus Them.” I wanted to shout at the screen. “Don’t let them fool you.” “You are doing great without their directions” “Damn the Man!!”

But the brainwashing doesn’t end there. Oh no, if they left it at this, we might have a televised Lord of the Flies on our hands. No, what they did was even more insidious. They took this little bunch of egalitarians and divided them up into Bourgeois and Proletariats. Some will be the upper class that get the most amount of money, but do the least amount of work. Others will be the merchants that will appease the masses with candy and soda. Others will be the “skilled” working class, even though they haven’t demonstrated any skills. And of course last we have the Laborers. They will scrub the latrines and haul the water. If you watched the show, note that the girl that had demonstrated the most skill at cooking did not become a member of the skilled class that would be doing the cooking. No she gets to scrub toilets.

This was very insidious and brilliant on the part of the producers. After dividing up the kids into groups they will manage to keep the peace by forcing the socio-economic reality of the real world onto their “reality-show world”. The kids won’t see anything wrong with this model because it represents the world from which they came from. What I find the most distressing is that the kids easily fall into this forced structure without a word of complaint. They don’t see that there is any alternative, even though they were walking down a different path all on their own.

Now I am not some communist radical. In fact I am capitalist because I believe it is the best economic model that we have come up with. But come on, these kids had the potential to show the world that capitalism is not the only alternative. The natural innocence of these kids had to be squashed in order to help mold them into the perfect little consumers. They had to create a system where in order to be rewarded you needed to “suck up” to the establishment so that you might get a Gold Star. I am not prone to muttering “capitalist pigs” under my breath, but this was too much. Ray Bradbury said, “The function of science fiction is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.” I don’t think America has read enough science fiction.