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LOST is just one show which will not return as anticipated. Series writer and co-creator Damon Lindelof has this to say about the strike and its foundations.

We feel your pain, Charlie. We do. We may not have not suffered the intense trauma of literally spiraling downward amidst the chaos, confusion, disorder, and derangement of an actual plane crash (of course, neither did you), but we are about to lose the most promising season of television in years.

You’ve all heard by now that the WGA is on strike. If you one of the few people on the internet old enough to remember the last time this happened (1988) then you remember life before reality TV… and you share our pain at the evolution of the world’s most inaptly named genre. While it’s true that we occasionally love to hate reality shows, it’s also true that we vaguely blame them for the downfall of civilization as we once hoped to know it. In fact we recently conducted a completely unscientific poll asking some of our favorite webbers to name the best and worst shows on television; Kid Nation won both categories. (While some fans love the purity of interaction which can only occur between two children, an equal number of viewers just want to dig their eyes out with a spoon whenever Jared comments.)

For those of you who don’t remember the last strike, not to worry. You’re about to get a taste of just how potently a well-organized union can really affect your life… Entourage is about to go poof. As are 30 Rock, House, Gray’s Anatomy, Jericho (#&*!), The Office, My Name Is Earl, Heroes, Rescue Me, Dirt, K-Ville, NCIS, CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI In the Holy Land (it could happen), and a barrage of other shows you have so flippantly taken for granted by expecting someone in the real world to actually write the silly things (Jericho possibly notwithstanding - we love you Skeet!). This is of course in contrast to the shows which have already gone poof, such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, and pretty much all of late-night. Just be glad the soap operas and Ellen have more integrity than that.

The current strike is both complex and important, and not just because we’re gonna miss the everlovin’ crap out of Steve Carrell and Jon Stewart. Though the overly simplistic summary is that writers want more money, what’s really at stake here is the future of entertainment technology. With the advent of gadgets like iPods and DVR’s, television has entered the digital age and viewers have taken control over what they watch - which means a “Yes” to high dramedy, and a big fat “NO!” to commercials. The result is that the corporations that advertise on TV networks are losing money, which means Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch are losing money. And if we can be sure of anything in today’s culture of mega-conglomerated, super-monopolistic corporations, we can be sure that when these guys lose money, heads roll in a big bad way. Trouble is, it’s usually the wrong heads.

Enter writers, stage left. Someone has to make up for the dollars/euros lost by advertisers, and you can be damn sure that someone is NOT going to be Redstone, Murdoch, or any of the other uber-beneficiaries of your hard earned consumer dollars. Instead, networks are passing the loss down the entertainment ladder to the writers. Most of the public has no direct emotional connection to the writers; we don’t idolize them, we idolize the actors. So we don’t have an immediate visceral reaction to reports that writers are getting the shaft. After all, they make bucu bucks compared with us. Why should we stop nursing, or fixing cars, or teaching kids, or fighting fires, in order to jump up and support them? So the writers are giving us a reason. We should support them because Matthew Fox is pretty, but he does not write the show. Not only does the strike affect viewers, but it brings the celebrities and their hard-hitting publicity value into the arena. When the writers don’t work, celebrities don’t work. When celebrities don’t work, people notice. Low and behold, here we all are, noticing. The networks say they can’t pay writers for shows being downloaded, but the writers are slinging their own words back at them. And the writers are right.

What will be the outcome? Only time will tell, but if it’s true that history repeats itself we can expect a few things. Reality TV, or some other relatively inexpensive and probably mindless genre, will take center stage. This is bad news because with so much crap already on the air, reality shows will have to outdo themselves, and the results will no doubt be ugly. Also, the networks will accuse writers of being greedy, and will ironically appeal to the average joe’s ever-thinning wallet as proof of this greed. Fortunately, the writers will put up a pretty entertaining fight, mostly because they know how to invoke an emotional response in their audience. In fact, the best thing they could probably do for their cause would be to go ahead and script the strike. There’s not going to be fook-all else to watch anyway. Certainly they will use the most celebrified amongst their ranks to spread their cause, and eventually they will come to some agreement that is mutually unsatisfactory to both sides, because everyone loses if the strike goes on too long. Viewers were lost in droves after the 1988 strike, and have never returned in numbers proportional to pre-strike audiences.

Which means the good news is that all this really boils down to you - the viewer. How long you’re willing to endure without the writers is in direct relation to what the strike will achieve. The longer you hold out, the more power the writers will have, and the more integrity television shows will hopefully gain. Now is the time to choose your stance, because networks are about to become obscure, and they don’t like it one little bit. Technology will soon reach the point that you will be able to download everything on demand, and then there will be no time-slots or captive audiences. The Redstones of the world are vying for control of that technology, while the writers are wrestling to pull some of that control back to you, the viewers. Their stake is in you, because they believe you would prefer to watch shows involving at least one thought process over the tripe you’d otherwise be fed by network execs whose real job is to sell advertising time. You watch what you like, and if Sumner wants to sell you crap, he’ll have to find a way to make you want to watch the pitch. If he doesn’t, you can just tune in to the next episode of LOST and tell him you’d rather keep your cash. Yeah, you might end up paying a dollar or so for the privilege, but wouldn’t you rather pay a dollar to watch something you like, than watch what this guy tells you to for free? The best news about this whole strike is that you the viewers are unofficially in charge. For once, someone with some power is banking on your integrity and far-sightedness to shift the greater power structure. The networks will deny this fact to the ends of their days, but this is your last best chance to have a real effect on how much control consumers will actually have over the new digital market.

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Just to break up the monotony of things, we’re going to do today in rewind. Here’s a list of all today’s stories which we think you need to know/will be amused by/suspect that we made up, in advance and in no particular order:

• The TV Writers are all striking. This means no new episodes of The Office after next week. There aren’t enough curse words in the English language for us to describe our feelings about this, but at least Dorothy Parker’s Blog is giving a rundown on all the guest appearances slated for November sweeps. Best we take advantage of whatever good TV remains, because “reality” TV is about to get another boost. Unless of course the networks decide to head over the pond and steal the Queen’s writers.

• Speaking of foreign fortuity (not so fortuitous), Feministing directs us to a delightful article about 8 teenage Australian boys who “avoided youth detention” by entering therapy after pleading guilty to gang raping and setting fire to a local girl, putting the whole event on DVD, and then releasing the DVD into the community. Hopefully the boys’ wrists aren’t too sore after that slap. Jezebel posts an interesting poll asking readers to consider the value of rehabilitation versus retribution in the case.

• If you’ve had a heart attack or stroke as a result of taking Vioxx, Merck (the pharmaceutical company which advertised the painkiller on national television despite concerns over the drug’s safety) would like you to please drop your lawsuit. Unless of course you’re already dead, in which case, oops…their bad.
• Bob Costas may be turning out the lights during halftime reports in the midst of NBC’s Green Week, but not much attention is being paid to an oil spill in San Francisco, which occurred when a barge struck one of the supporting towers of the Bay Bridge.

• Even though we’re not particularly militarily inclined, we feel compelled to wish the U.S. Marine Corps a Happy 232nd Birthday. Here’s looking forward to the day when your job consists entirely of aiding the recovery of unavoidable disasters, and you always come home safe at night. Oh, and please lay off the moose, er, meese.

• Archaeologists reveal what we have long suspected - the Greeks have always know their food. A Greek geek living in Cajun country has taste buds happy enough to take over the world. My but we do love it here in the South, which is not to say that we’re particularly fond of all Southerners. Just that we’re fighting the battle from within its own ranks, and the rations ain’t bad.

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He may be America, but he’s not on the ballot.

South Carolina democratic committee members, aided apparently by local mindreaders, determined yesterday that Stephen Colbert, political satirist and host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, is not serious about running for president and therefore denied his application to run in the South Carolina democratic primary. Committee members who initially accepted Colbert’s $2500 filing fee now state that the fee will be returned. Although Colbert jested on air that he planned to run in both the Democratic and Republican races, he did not submit the $35,000 filing fee to the Republican race.

This is the part where you should be asking yourself why it costs 14 times more to run as a Republican. Or for that matter, why a serious candidate for any party would have to shell out that kind of dinero in every state just to get a chance at the ballot. It turns out when they say “Democracy isn’t free” they’re not kidding around. Welcome to lesson one in American politics - if banks don’t call you to ask for money, don’t bother running for office.

Another question you might be asking right now is why reject Colbert anyway, particularly if he’s not serious? What’s the big threat? Sure, he’s a political satirist, and his campaign is full of hijinks and sponsored by Doritos. So what? No, he doubtless has no genuine desire to quit his outrageously successful television career to take over the White House right after what is widely considered to be the most botched presidency of the century. Who cares? He is the first candidate that Generation X - the children of the baby boomers - have come out in droves to support. Whether he wins or loses is entirely beside the point. Whether or not he is allowed to run the race is EXACTLY the point.

Yes, the point IS in fact that the same Americans who can’t seem to agree on what brand of soap to use are banding together through the facetious candidacy of a ridiculously successful political satirist in order to make a statement about their feelings toward their own government. Their support reflects the widespread belief that the political process in the U.S. has been whittled down to not much more than a choice between two ideologically similar candidates courting the same majority moderate vote, neither of whom are particularly desirable, but both of whom are rich and (thus far) older White males. Minority and female candidates who wish to attempt to break the glass ceiling are forced even further toward the idealogical middle-of-the-road by pressure to garner as many votes as possible from all sides. They’re forced to run on platforms that don’t stand for anything so much as stand against the other candidates. Meanwhile, lobbyists outnumber actual elected officials in the capitol by several dozen to one, and voters make no bones about their overwhelming feeling that their votes don’t matter.

The same generation that backs the Colbert candidacy is one that often gets a bad reputation as “Slackers,” citizens who had not fought on foreign soil until the Bush administration’s War on Iraq and were thus represented as not having the capacity to either realize or understand what it takes to run a successful democracy. However, if their overwhelming support for Colbert campaign proves anything, it proves that this slacker reputation is unwarranted. The under-40 crowd, which enlisted in the Armed Forces in droves after 9/11 in the delusory hopes of putting an end to terrorism, was sold an idealogical war on nothing more than false pretenses and bad information. The result has been not the majestic and noble humanitarian effort they imagined, but rather a tangle of political and military battles which have shed excessive amounts of blood on all sides, and which continues with no realistic end in sight. They volunteered to fight a war on terrorism, but were sent as little more than sacrificial lambs to police an area with over 2000 years of infighting based on cultures with which the current administration has neither sufficient knowledge nor an ounce of basic human respect. Theories about the motives behind the rush to war are varied, but historical lows in the approval ratings of both the presidential administration (24%) and congress (11%) show that virtually no one believes the situation has in any way been handled competently.

Yet younger generations of American voters continue to be labeled as everything from misinformed, to gullible, to lazy or even downright stupid when election time comes around. But to understand where these voters are coming from, one has to consider the context of their lives in the greater society. Voter turnout is a complicated issue dependent on many factors, and to suggest that youthful lack of experience is the sole (or even primary) cause of low turnout is to drastically minimize the potential these generations have to affect positive change in our marginally democratic system.

It is true that the voter turnout rate in the U.S. is shamefully low. Out of 140 democratic nations worldwide, the United States ranks 114th in overall voter turnout. Yet the fairy tale of the triumph of the democratic process here continues to be spun - perhaps most effectively by the very officials who manage to get elected by the few voters who will show up at the polls on election day. Instead of bringing about change, these officials immediately get caught up in the financial and time pressures of re-election, usually to the extreme detriment of their constituents’ best interests. Platform promises of systemic changes and vital improvements seem to be forgotten the day after the election, and the wearisome process of sorting out the mediocre from the truly heinous preoccupies a country that is desperate for fresh leadership which would place the needs of the public over the interests of corporate lobbies. Nor are the politicians entirely at fault; the exorbitant costs of running for public office ensure that politicians must devote the majority of their time and efforts to fundraising, leaving them vulnerable to the wealth and power of special interest groups and unable to focus on the needs of their electorate. Campaign finance issues practically require candidates to find corporate or special interest sponsors, which Colbert illustrates with his satirical Dorito’s sponsorship. After all, at least if voters knew ahead of time who was footing the bill, they’d know who was ultimately making the decisions.

Also conspicuous in its absence is the popular media’s dissection and analysis as to why American voters are so much less persistent than their European and other global counterparts; what is inherently different about politics this country? Although the answer to such a question likely involves a complicated interaction between social, political, and economic factors, one glaring difference exists. The U. S. government offers far fewer socio-economic relief programs than virtually ANY of its fellow democracies. Nearly every one of those nations offers some form of paid family leave (doled out in matters of years, not weeks) for new parents. They do not expect families - particularly single parent ones - to carry the entire financial and social burden for the society’s children alone without a significant break in job duties. They offer some form of universal health care, ensuring that not only the children but their parents and other adults will not suffer or die of easily preventable or treatable illnesses simply because they cannot afford the ever-rising cost of medical care. They offer state-supported childcare, helping parents to ensure that children have safe and healthy place to go when the parents do return to work. The list continues, but the overall message seems clear. Voters who can see the product of their elections and taxes in their own daily lives have an infinitely higher interest in the democratic process as a whole. They feel themselves to be a vital part of the process, rather than abandoned by it. They empower whole communities to care for each other instead of blaming individuals for needing or seeking assistance from their government, because it is truly their government. They pay the taxes (and despite the media’s constant griping about high tax rates, Americans overall pay far less in taxes than their foreign counterparts) and they decide how the money is best spent to support their communities and improve their societies. It is they, both in theory and in practice, who are “the deciders.” It might therefore be a reasonable to conclude that taxes, and not death on foreign soil, are the true cost of a successful democracy. But in return for offering up their hard-earned incomes, voters must feel that they can directly and meaningfully impact the decision on how those funds are spent, and this is where American voters have largely lost faith.

Also in contrast to the voter apathy theory, polls have shown that Americans do in fact value the democratic process, at least in theory. A recent poll of eligible voters in California found that “28 percent of infrequent voters and 23 percent of those unregistered said they do not vote or do not register to vote because they are too busy.” It is likely no coincidence that these same voters live in the state with the second highest cost of living in the nation. Though conventional wisdom would most likely condemn these non-voters for their apparent apathy, the same study found that “93 percent of infrequent voters agreed that voting is an important part of being a good citizen and 81 percent of nonvoters agreed it is an important way to voice their opinions on issues that affect their families and communities.” It seems a reasonable conclusion, then, that these would-be voters are not apathetic. Rather, they are under extreme pressures to maintain their households and place in society - pressures which might be alleviated by the existence of social programs like state-supported health and child care. Without such programs, the cost of living can do nothing but rise, and American workers are pushed even further out on an already precarious financial limb. For example, last year approximately nine million Americans turned to “soup kitchens” and food pantries for help putting food on the table despite living in gainfully employed households. An American worker making minimum wage at a full-time job earns between $10,000 and $11,000 per year, which is nearly $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about 29% lower than the value of a minimum wage job in 1979. It’s really no mystery why they can’t find the time to keep up with a political process that seems to dismiss their desperation out of hand in the first place.

What does all this have to do with South Carolina democratic primary committee members refusing Stephen Colbert’s application for candidacy? The answer lies in the amount of popular support Colbert’s brief tongue-in-cheek campaign garnered. Eligible voters, particularly those among Generation X, are speaking as loudly as they can about their disillusionment with American politics by not speaking (read voting) at all. People who normally cannot find the time to fill out a voter registration card flocked to internet message boards and chat rooms to profess their support for this would-be campaign. Voters who are otherwise politically paralyzed by their feelings of disenfranchisement from the system vociferously asserted their desire for something other than “politics as usual” in the form of this unexpectedly bold political satirist, who (following the paths of popular conservatives like President Raegan and Governor Schwarzenegger) snuck into the realm of political power by the back alley portal of entertainment rather than the front door of lawyering. But yesterday that back door was slammed in his face, and the backlash will likely have the opposite effect of the committee’s intentions. Make no mistake about it - Americans wanted to see this campaign in action. They wanted it not because they are stupid, or because they are apathetic to politics, or because they are slaves to Comedy Central, but because they NEED a change from the current political system. They wanted to know that someone shares their sense of outraged disbelief at the absurdity of the options from which they have to choose. They wanted to express their mistrust of and discontentment (rapidly degenerating into outright anger and seething hatred) with all of the obvious candidates. They wanted to do something to force a change in the system, even if it was wrong. In short, they wanted to see what would happen. What happened was they got a heavy dose of the real bottom line from both the democratic and the republican parties; choose between the candidates we put before you, or you’ll have no choice at all. The ball is now in their court, and the political system is likely unprepared for the serve it’s about to receive.

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