There’s a show where newlyweds volunteer to have their home-to-be completely redecorated by a team of resourceful pro designers. The lovebirds return from their honeymoon for a big surprise. For, all they get to keep from their previous possessions for sure, is a single “protected item” each. Anything else is liable to be radically refashioned, given away, or simply fed to the woodchipper...

I see in this, as so many--if not all--of the so-called “reality shows”, whether by accident or design, the heavy hand of the totalitarian agenda at work. We are to accept without question the decree of the collectivity, as embodied in interchangeably telegenic “experts”, even in such matters as formerly were left to personal discretion: our vaunted “individuality”, however, being symbolized by one pitiful relict item--like the “flesh-strips” which guaranteed the humanness of the cyborgs in Moderan.

Elsewhere wardrobes & whole bodies are likewise being subjected to complimentary “makeovers” (& they don’t even keep a “protected feature”, either!)--our pleasure in watching this exercise in voyeuristic disempowerment, is really not so very far from that of the Roman Circus, where the stripping away of dignity, & then life itself, became the daily fodder of ever more demanding citizen-consumers flush with imperial hubris.