What a strange break this was for me. It began with jury duty, which served as quite a reminder of what goes on outside of Hanover. We were hearing a case of assault and battery. Apparently one woman thought another was sleeping with her husband, and so they had a bit of a scuffle over this. I honestly don't think that it was worth my time to settle this disagreement between Ms. Greene and her neighbor, but as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts repeatedly pointed out to me, it is my Civic Obligation.
The trial amounted to one person's word against another, and I think that the junior prosecutor must not have truly cared about the case, since she only brought the accuser to the stand. Despite this lack of interest that both attorneys displayed during the trial, they still seemed interested in talking as much as possible about things that had already been made clear. Redundancy was an art form in that court room.
The interesting part of jury duty was actually the deliberations and the interaction of the jury when we were in recess or deciding the case. I was the youngest there, with everyone else in their thirties or forties. Since we couldn't talk about the trial during recess, the guys in the room decided to talk about the latest episodes of Jerry Springer, which I suppose was really not that big a leap from the case that we were deciding. And after all, we are all guaranteed a trial by a jury of our peers. I'm sure John Marshall would have been proud.
Of course, since we don't really have television here in Hanover, I was tragically out of the loop, and the 600-pound woman who hasn't left her bed in a decade was left to my imagination. Now, I know generally what kind of entertainment Jerry Springer provides, but I had no clue as to the fervent passion for the show that his devotees possess. These guys arranged their lunch breaks just so they could watch Jerry Springer.
Why this popularity? I think it's because Springer knows that his show is basically trash and doesn't try to hide that fact. Donahue was always somewhere between Days of Our Lives and 60 Minutes. He was lost in a sea of popular culture. Springer is defining what is popular if these guys were any indication.
Maybe they aren't, though. The two older housewives on the jury were not Springer fans and condemned his show as "trash television." They put their two cents in with, "I think that show is just awful." And, "I just don't understand why anyone would allow themselves to be degraded like that."
One of them was particularly quick to pass judgment, both about the actual case and about Springer. She also had a tendency to state her positions as truth. She seemed to think that her opinion was so important there was simply no way anyone else could contest it. She probably watches equally sensationalized material on television also, but doesn't even know it. Just because John Tesh sits behind a desk doesn't make it the nightly news. Maybe it comes in the form of daytime soaps instead of Springer, but in the end, it's all about watching the freakish lives of others unfold on your television. At least Springer is up front about it.
This point was emphasized for me as I was watching Biography this past week. The featured personality was David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam. Let me tell you, it doesn't get much more freakish than him. I don't care how much that woman on Springer weighed; Berkowitz was a wacko.
Sensation comes in blatant forms such as Jerry Springer, but it also comes in the guise of A&E, and we don't even realize it. In the end, that's all that entertainment really is, it's the sensational, the unusual, and the extraordinary. From one TV show to the other, it's only the packaging that changes. Perhaps Springer's wrapping is remarkably absent, but we should think about some of the other stuff that we watch before we judge.
