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Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Naked and Afraid

When you are outside of American society and popular American culture long enough, things begin to look rather strange upon peeking back in. 

For some years, I did not watch television shows from America at all; but with the progression of the internet in Indonesia, these have now become available on free-to-watch movie sites. As I scrolled through the available TV shows, I happened upon the unlikely title "Naked and Afraid". 

Naked and Afraid? What can this be? A show about a serial rapist?  A nudist colony gone bad? A documentary about current US border detention policy? 

Well, no. As wild as those ideas seem, this is stranger yet, for here is a reality show, rather after the fashion of Survivor, I suppose, where two people, a man and a woman, are sent into one or another of the world's harshest climates to face the challenge of the elements for two weeks. And survive. Maybe. 

Oh, and they must leave their clothing behind. 

Yup. 

Americans do love an apocalypse. It seems an odd thing after all these centuries of struggle toward the comforts of civilization--to be warm and clothed and fed and safe--that the compelling dream should be of returning to the stone age, to throw off comfort and invite all those forces from which we have so long sought to protect ourselves. 

The episode I watched was set in a jungle in the interior of Mexico, where, as the narrator gleefully tells us, the naked couple will be threatened by vicious animals, poisonous snakes, dehydration and disease carrying insects. Lol. Oh boy! 

Angst turned on its head. What do you do when you realize that you have everything you wanted, other than to decide that you really wanted none of it? 

American novelist and essayist Walker Percy wrote as one of his main themes about dis-ease in American society, alienation and malaise. The ultimate product of our comfort is somehow discomfort. We seem to be interacting with our created environment rather than with the environment that created us, and we long not to get somewhere, but to return to somewhere. 

Remember the old 60's song, Back to the Garden? 

I was born to be royal
I was made to be free
But I was torn from the garden
When that devil lied to me


What to do? Suffer the tenderness of our own Frankenstein interminably (and then die), or throw off the fetters, burst through our prison doors, and face something real again--like leopards and bears, hunger and want, pangs and stings!  

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