May 3, 2003

• You think you’re tough jumping out of airplanes on ‘Fear Factor?’ Eating bugs on ‘Survivor?’
  
  You know NOTHING about hardship until you’ve lived under the strict rules of Edwardian England, as in ‘Manor House,’ which I just can’t stop watching.
  
  My local channel has been running them two in a row in the middle of the night, so I sit there in rapt amazement as they work out their heirarchical troubles. This is quality stuff.
  
  The moment when I knew this show really meant it was when the house threw a garden party, and the local Clarion Bicycle Club chapter showed up uninvited and started telling the staff about socialism. The look of disapproval on the face of the lord, the furtive grins on the faces of the staff as they sheepishly sing along with unionist hymns…
  
  The show also spends a lot of time exploring how completely awful it was to live at the top of that heirarchy. The only one who seems to like it is the head of the house, and why shouldn’t he?
  
  The participants frequently compare their lives within the project to their 21st century lives, and this to me is the best part. They agonize about how constrained they are, and how rigidly structured their every waking moment is. This is at every level of the heirarchy.
  
  I think that Marxism is an antiquated view, and that we’re at a place in time where it’s hard to call for solutions from the 1900s. But if it took Marxism to get us through this Edwardian crap, and the similar social systems throughout Europe, then right on, comrade!

  • 6:17 am
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