Jon and Kate Plus the Evils of Capitalism, Or, We Can't Go Back

Tonight the highly anticipated series finale of Jon and Kate Plus 8 will air on TLC, leaving viewers to ask, where will we go to now to witness such a fantastic unraveling of a marriage? Those who believe this drama is far beneath them, that believe it's much more important to watch news for the current state of the economy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd implore to take a look at the show for answers to these pressing difficulties.

As it's well known and documented by Marshall McLuhan or some other media genius, what takes place on television often reflects what is happening in our culture. Some study whose name I wish I could remember said that television also affects in no small degree the book publishing industry. In the early to mid 90s when TV shows related to law (L.A. Law, Law and Order) regularly busted up the Neilsen ratings, the book business was also looking for lawyerly fiction. Oh hello, John Grisham and Brian Haig! And then in the late 90s and through today when reality TV took over basically every network--young twenties live together! washed-up celebrities dance together! pseudo-celebrities recover from meth addictions together!--so did the memoir/creative nonfiction books start selling like mad. Readers in America said, give us your fucked up childhoods, writers of America! Uh, okay, sure. I was born at just the right time for the endeavor I'm working within, and if I weren't so lazy I might have already profited from it.

The idea of profit is such a beautiful segue into Jon and Kate. Of course you already know them, but let me indulge in a synopsis of their television (and real?) lives. Kate is domineering and talks to her husband as if he's one of her children, though in her defense, he behaves a lot like one of them. In the introductory opening to every episode, one can witness a segment of the episode in which the family goes to the pig farm, and Jon is sitting on a hay bale watching his kids scamper madly until Kate leans over and screams (shrill voiced), Hello! Get up and do your job! and adds a few snaps of the fingers as punctuation. The series is, if nothing else, a series of abject lessons on what not to do in a marriage, and luckily no party is guiltless. Surely there is a way to persuade a husband to grow up (leave him?), and while I have no idea what that is, I'm certain that Kate's way isn't it.

What both parties are for sure guilty of is the exploitation of their children. It must be because all eight of those little twinkies are as cute as, well, twinkies, that the show is as incredibly popular as it's become. A miserable couple is only interesting if eight twinkling orbs of pretty are surrounding them--they have to make it work, they've got eight beautiful kids to love and support (okay, seven beauties: Mady is a fucking nightmare).

Kate's counterargument to this is that the show is for the children. The revenues from TLC and the book tours (Kate's a writer too, la di da) and speaking engagements have made the family tremendously wealthy. Now they've got money for college, money to be comfortable and live the lives they want to lead. Oh yes, they're comfortable. So much so that in the past five years they've lived in three different homes: first a four-bedroom house in a subdivision in central Pennsylvania, then a six-bedroom house, and now finally in a fourteen-bedroom, ten-bath home on many acres of land, room enough for all the kids to grow up and build their own homes on the property. Ah, said Goldilocks, that's just right.

Jon and Kate have every right to become wealthy off their talents, even if their talents of two include being vile and fertile. Oh, and organized. Kate's very organized. But does that make this right? What are we rewarding, and at what cost to ourselves?

One of the most resounding health care reform arguments coming from the right side of the aisle in Congress these past few months is that America was founded on the basis of an entrepreneurial spirit, on the notion that if one works hard enough one can be whatever he (and later, black people, and later, she) wants to become. This includes becoming the CEO of health insurance companies. These people have the godderned right to run their businesses as they see fit. Offering as little service as possible to the greatest number of people is part of that entrepreneurial spirit the right insists on defending, and pardon me if I don't want to plant a sloppy kiss on Tassin Barnard, the CEO of MetLife who refuses to pay for my anesthesia during a wisdom tooth extraction because, hey, I should've sucked it up and done without.

The problem is that as soon as one starts suggesting that certain capitalism practices need some reform, or at the very least regulation, the masses decry one as immoral and not fit for our soil. (Quick tangential anecdote: when grading my British literature tests I came across a student who assessed Thomas More in this way, "He's an evil, immoral socialist, and he wrote Utopia to try to spread his vile socialist notions to England." She forgot first that socialism did not exist in the 16th century, and that More actually died defending his right to practice the religion of his choice despite Henry VIII's denial of this right, thus, off with his head. I mentioned that More's defense of his human rights were very American of him, weren't they? and I was happy to mark her answer wrong and add up the points that led to her D+ on the test.)

It perpetually boggles the mind how in a country that so values free speech, one is loathe to actually practice it lest she be called unAmerican or French or some bullshit. My frustration also extends to sundry ex-Facebook buddies and variable dickheads on the street who walk around thinking, "I work hard all day, and these lazy_________ (insert racial epithet) just want to live off the government." I'm quoting sundry dickheads spread across my life verbatim. Why, I want to ask, are you so mad at the black guy on his stoop drinking a Olde English, but why aren't you mad at the dozens of CEOs, worth billions, who just got the biggest welfare checks in American history? Which citizen--forty drinker or CEO--is more greatly responsible for the crisis we find ourselves in today?

Let me be clear that I recognize many people live off the government, and are lazy, and it's deplorable. My sister, though she often works minimum wage jobs, is quite lazy as a person, and lives off the government, and will probably continue to do so in the foreseeable future. This is a result of poor choices, most prominently a silly boy as teeming as Niagra Falls. The point is many people are lazy: some of them are lawyers and teachers and pharmacists, and some are cashiers. And although they may be inherently lazy, cashiers have to work their asses off and still receive government assistance. If it weren't for Medicaid I don't know how my sister would deliver her children, which those on the right view as one of the most sacrosanct acts known to man. Yet health care is still not a top priority.

I'm digressing: Jon and Kate. They are currently fighting about, among many other things, the house. She wants to keep it, but really it's too big for only nine of them. And the major question for Jon and Kate and millions of Americans is: How can we go back? The thought of Kate downscaling to a smaller home now that they won't be receiving revenues from the show is just abominable. I'm not speaking for her; she's said this herself. It's about quality of life for the kids, she says. She may have a point there, but her constant obfuscation of what she has to gain, how her individual quality of life has improved, leads me to believe that the lady doth protest too much.

I began to ponder Jon and Kate and the potential evils of capitalism because I recently read another Mary Karr interview, this one on Huffington Post. In it she laments that her book wasn't on any of the major top ten best books of the year lists, and compares herself to Michael Herr, whose wondrous Dispatches didn't win Book of the Year, and how no one remembers who won that year, only that Herr didn't. But alas, says Mary, she'll leave it up to history and readers to decide whether or not this latest book is meritorious. If readers buy it, she says, she wins.

Karr cannot allow herself to retreat from celebrity-land. The focus isn't "let me tell you about the process of this book," but instead, "let me tell you how much I don't care about the awards I haven't won." She cannot not be Mary Karr at any moment in her life. She is the seller of books, the winner of prizes. Similarly, Jon and Kate cannot go back. They are tabloid mainstay, they are speakers to red America, they are Halloween costumes and they are the owners of one fucking enormous mansion they'll soon be unable to afford.

But how do they go back? They might be able to sell stuff, sure, but how much selling would be equitable to weakness? What new thing should we do? they must be asking themselves. A reunion, I'd hazard a guess, is already in the works. Because the answer to the question of how they go back is simple: they can't. They caught that entrepreneurial spirit, the zeitgeist that never dies, and like Mary Karr have proven to themselves that they are just a little bit more famous, just a little bit more important and talented than the rest of us. Retreating to the past humble you toiling over a book, toiling over kids alone, is impossible. Going back is death.

Thing is, I'm guilty falling prey to the zeitgeist too. I cannot go back to my 600 square foot Bluebonnet Place apartment in Baton Rouge. I cannot go back to the mouse-infested shack in Thibodaux. I've put in my dues, dammit, gotten the degrees, slipped on the ring, and I deserve to live with my husband in a home it's becoming increasingly more difficult to afford. And I'm a liberal socialist.

In this beautiful, three bedroom house I'm lucky enough to temporarily call home, I'll watch the finale of Jon and Kate in just a few minutes. I'm grateful that I already know the ending to the TV show: a marriage dies. But then how many dreams are born: I have a talent too, echoes one viewer after another in living room after living room. They live like so many crickets outside my window who exist only through the insistence of their sounds. I can do anything, cuz this is America.