Cosmetic Surgery
Until last night I had no idea there was a “news” “magazine” on Fox called “The Pulse,” which somehow is anchored by the same damned Fox “reporter” who’s “reporting” the war, and is supposed to be somewhere out in Qatar or Kuwait. (I know that Fox reporter. He was once an anchor for NBC Channel 7 News in Miami. Factoid: more than three quarters of all Fox national pseudo-journalists and talking heads for exploitative “newsfeature” programs like “Inside Edition” got their start on NBC Channel 7 News in Miami. They basically invented the Fox News format and the video-tabloid sleazestyle, at least two years before the debut of “Inside Edition.”)
Well, featured on “The Pulse” this week was a segment called “Extreme Makeover.” It all started when some hick lugnut looked at his wife’s legs and said, “Honey, if you lost that weight, you could almost be pretty.” I’m not sure; it could have been, “See that girl over there? You could be pretty like her, if you lost that weight on your legs.” You could see the tears rolling down the wife’s cheeks when she recounted this. You could see in her eyes that she’d been the victim of emotional abuse at her husband’s hands for years, devoid of any self-esteem whatsoever, clearly exhibiting symptoms of depression and dysmorphia, and thus was willing to do whatever it took to achieve the approval of her husband.
I honestly couldn’t believe what I was seeing: it was just like the horrendous soliloquy in Titus Andronicus, when Lavinia’s brother sees her, raped and mutilated, and describes in baroque detail the violence done to her, rhetorically violating her a second time; and when Titus himself suggests she place the stick in her mouth, grotesquely re-traumatizing Lavinia in a dumb-show of forced fellatio and rape, to manipulate it with the stumps of her hands to write the names of her torturers in the sand. “The Pulse” was deliberately and blatantly exploiting this woman’s psychological abasement, as much as her physical “flaws,” for our entertainment under the guise of charity! Standing there in a bikini, trembling for shame of her own appearance, the cameras bobbed and weaved in and out of every perceptible “flaw” in her physique. Scopophilic rape. We can all laugh at the puncture of inflated egos on something like “Are You Hot?” but this was offensive. Worse than exploitative.
Admittedly, she had gone a bit pear-shaped, and had cellulite issues in her thighs. But let’s get this clear — by no means could she be called obese — a solid regimen of exercise and diet changes would have worked wonders. But since it was on Fox’s expense account, it was on to the lipo. They managed to show the bloody puss-colored fat being vaccuumed out of her quads just as I was settling down to my mac-’n'-cheese. Cut to the husband: “I hear you’re an ass man.” “Yeah, I, uh, huh-huh, uh, yeah, I like a good ass.” “Well, you’re going to love what we have to show you now.”
But after the body was done, they moved on to her face. It hurts me now to even recount this, because there was nothing wrong with her face. She had an adorable face. She looked so cute, and so sad, I almost had the impulse to call her up and ask her out for dinner. They drew lines around her cheeks, telling her and the camera exactly how they were going to fix her “flaws.” Her eyes had the look of a cow’s as it’s being herded into an abattoir.
She had a lovely face, a wonderful face, a face one could fall in love with if one had a heart. When they unpeeled the bandages, and she, her friends, family, daughter erupted in gleeful surprise, she had the face of a Miss America contestant.
That is to say, the face of the most purely bland image of American female acceptability, anonymous, just like anyone else’s. I watched this and felt for her, felt like skin was being ripped from my arms, felt like my blood had turned to liquid excrement, like my voice in the enunciation of the word “humanity” was a ventriloquist’s echo from a far-off corridor. And she was transformed. Her husband loved her again.
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And somehow, now, in my mind I connect this segment with Ari Fleischer’s newest pontification, to wit: whether or not we find Saddam is irrelevant; regime change will have been accomplished. As if closure, justice is irrelevant; as if Iraqis will feel secure, not knowing whether their tyrant is dead or imprisoned; as if Mussolini hanging and Hitler’s suicide are nothing more than regicidal spectacles. It’s hardly surprising Fox carries both conservative war coverage and “The Pulse” — for cosmetic surgery isn’t just for individuals any more; we’ve just traded a doctor for a President, and a scalpel for a smart bomb. The image is the message, isn’t it?
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