The hysteria over\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/em>\u00a0reminds us that cable TV is currently inundated with working-class, white-guy reality shows. Top-drawing, relatively low-cost realities These shows share a few common themes. They do not take place in an office, where most Americans work. They are not Kardashian psychodramas about plastic surgery gone bad, or a Gucci purse that underwhelmed the latte bunch in Brentwood. The men appear a bit beefier, perhaps stronger, but not necessarily more fit than your average American suburbanite. A big gut can add gravitas to the moonshiner\u2019s biceps in a way impossible to achieve at the gym.<\/p>\n These men don\u2019t quite shave each day, and close-up shots suggest that none use tooth whiteners. There are no Tony Robbinses on the chain-saw crew. Their speech usually is Southern-inflected, or at least rural-sounding. They are almost exclusively white, but do not seem to especially worry that they are. Whatever their actual income, the players clearly think of themselves\u00a0as solidly middle to lower middle class. They work with the sorts of machines, many of them dangerous \u2014 huge trucks on ice, four-foot-long chain saws, earth-moving equipment, industrial arc welders \u2014 that most Americans do not even know how to start up.<\/p>\n Given that these reality shows are, like professional wrestling, largely scripted, one mini-catastrophe \u2014 a snapped cable, a tipped-over Cat, a fishing boat dead in the water \u2014 is obligatory per episode to remind the viewing audience that we are not watching office workers complaining about someone\u2019s too-strong perfume or discussing a sex-discrimination suit filed against the boss.<\/p>\n The performers are also ostensibly politically incorrect, another characteristic preferably hinted at rather than in your face. While producers are usually careful not to allow their casts to spout off about their supposedly obnoxious political views, most viewers assume that a no-nonsense, screw-you attitude accompanies their brutal work. Usually, though, we have to make do with bleeped-out swear words and temper tantrums instead of an incorrect joke or musing. Anger at the gubmint bureaucrats who try to shut down the digging or who want to save a forest rat at the expense of a good tree suggests that the legions of Pajama Boys and Sandra Flukes are not welcome.<\/p>\n There are lots of theories why watching these good ol\u2019 boys at work has caught on. The zoo hypothesis suggests that American suburbanites are amused by exotic creatures that they rarely see at the mall or biking about the trails in Spandex \u2014 in perhaps the same way as Petronius wrote for his literate audience about smelly soldiers and crafty innkeepers. The miners and cutters certainly don\u2019t act like the Prius crowd in Menlo Park or the wine-tasters in Napa Valley.<\/p>\n Instead, just as grizzly bears and Bengal tigers are a big draw at the zoo, so too white-boy reality shows allow us to get close to these perhaps-endangered species. And as long as they do not stick their paws and snouts too far out between the bars to mouth off about gays, minorities, or feminists, there is a quaint appeal in \u2014 safely \u2014 watching these men cuss, and occasionally fight, while sawing and drilling in the wild. Why go on safari to their usual haunts in Alaska, Louisiana, or Wyoming, where bad things are said to happen to outsiders, when A&E can bring the perpetrator class, slightly sanitized, into your living room? A metrosexual can enjoy\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Ax Men<\/em>\u00a0without necessarily being fond of the political wing inhabited by Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee.<\/p>\n Aside from the idea of glimpsing rare species in their natural habitat, a second theory suggests that viewers are smugly satisfied that they are not like these uncouth white boys, who are certainly worse spoken, more emotional, less mature, and more intolerant than the viewership. For all the MSNBC talk of \u201cwhite privilege,\u201d these reality shows remind Americans of a non-minority underclass (fabricated though it is for TV) that is a bit worse off than the Latina newscaster who trills her Rs each evening on the news.<\/p>\n The producers perhaps sense that paradox of the so-called privileged being not too privileged. They usually script a clueless laborer forgetting to gas up the drilling rig and then wondering why it won\u2019t start \u2013\u00a0the producers\u2019 use of a sort of postmodern white version of Stepin Fetchit. Sometimes a foolish driver takes his tracked vehicle over a ridge \u2014 only to be surprised when it tips over. Things seem to smoke, blow up, and go kaboom a lot, as the good ol\u2019 boys apply baling wire to broken, but once sophisticated, store-bought machines. These white boys also seem perennially broke \u2014 just one good gold vein, a bunch of crab legs, or a good batch of moonshine away from at last dealing with their joyless, bottom-line-watching creditors.<\/p>\n Despite the wide variety of the shows, the characters in all their manifestations are stock. One is the aged patriarch who has no business still hobbling around, poking this and banging that, as if he cannot survive without a few dollars in wages that day. The viewer assumes that such unsophisticated folk are not padding their 401(k)s in anticipation of the time when their arthritic joints, bad backs, or incipient diabetes makes sawing or driving too excruciating. No accountant seems to be around to remind them to depreciate the tractor or write off the doctor\u2019s bill for the bad leg. They eat poorly, often smoke, and will not end up at 65 like the viewer who long ago got his cholesterol below 200 and avoids trans fats. Apparently, these strange shows offer viewers the reassurance not just that they are looking better, feeling healthier, and enjoying more security than those on screen, but also that the latter brought their problems on themselves. The ice truckers probably do not go in for their periodic colonoscopies.<\/p>\n But there is yet a third and perhaps more likely hypothesis (none of these are mutually exclusive), well beside the notions that viewers are either amused by the slapstick or satisfied they at least have not yet sunk so low. The national hysteria over\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/em>\u2019s successful war against GLAAD and the profit-minded A&E execs might suggest that the white working classes also are therapeutic for millions of Americans. Suburbanites and urban dwellers usually don\u2019t know much about nature; their jobs are not predicated on muscular strength. A fir, a pine, a spruce \u2014 they are all just trees. Who cares where north is, or whether the wind blows westward? Today\u2019s youth don\u2019t know the difference between a rip and a cross-cut saw.<\/p>\n Yet\u00a0Americanus suburbanus\u00a0<\/em>also has a vague sense that for all the talk about the Dow Jones, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook economy, someone somewhere else still must be doing something that accounts for lumber at Lowe\u2019s, gas at the corner Stop-N-Go, granite counters in the kitchen, and arugula at Whole Foods.<\/p>\n Perhaps for the techie designer, the insurance adjuster, or the special assistant to the university president, all that something in some strange way is felt to be more real, or at least fascinating. In the heart of every suburban soccer mom there is a reason she navigates a huge four-wheel-drive, snow-tire monstrosity, or has treads on her hiking boots that could take her over Mount Whitney. The ability to go anywhere is not necessarily antithetical to the usual reality of going nowhere. Watching these shows is a sort of grubbier version of wandering around an REI store, soaking up all the ways in which to confront the wild.<\/p>\n So good-ol\u2019-boy reality offers glimpses, premodern though they may be, of unrestrained freedom. In our upside-down world, the eighth-grade teacher understands that one wrong word, an ill-timed joke, a casual pat on the shoulder can end a career, pronto \u2014 while his punk student with the gang-banging parent who shouts profanity at him are mostly exempt from worry. The boss at the DMV accepts the fact that the whiff of a sexual-harassment suit, the rumor of an impending racial-discrimination allegation, the suggestion of inhospitality to the handicapped are more terrifying than the rowdy 16-year-old who pulls in to take his driving test in a monster truck. In our dreams it is better to be an ax man, where it\u2019s Mother Nature, not the local diversity czar, who is after you.<\/p>\n The crabmen and lumberjacks don\u2019t seem to worry about what they say or whom they offend \u2014 to the degree that such screw-it attitudes can be hinted about on politically correct camera. They are not fellow subjects who live among us in our kingdom of lies, in which you both dare not confess to profiling and dare not walk in a particular Philadelphia neighborhood. In contrast, these mythic men of the wild act as if they do not care about second-hand smoke or the right zip code. They apparently buy fast food, and their kids can watch bad TV \u2014 in a world where Mayor Bloomberg and Michelle Obama do not exist. There are no neurotic college-prep kindergartens with long waiting lists outside the trailer park in northern Alaska.<\/p>\n That freedom from our thought police and the Pajama Boy scolds and the social aspirations of the yuppie mesmerize the viewer \u2014 all the more so in that it usually entails giving up the good life as defined by the normal upper-middle-class\u00a0cursus honorum<\/em>. In our make-believe swamps, rugged forested Lala\u00a0Lands, or fishing boats tossing at sea, the contemporary Walter Mittys of the world unite to do what they want, say what they please, fight nature rather than the government statistician, and let the clerks sort it out \u2014 every night from 5\u00a0p.m.\u00a0onward.<\/p>\n NRO\u00a0contributor<\/em>\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the\u00a0Hoover Institution<\/a>\u00a0and the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/em>The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reality shows about gold miners, ax men, and ice-road truckers are a far cry from the Kardashians. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The hysteria over\u00a0Duck Dynasty\u00a0reminds us that cable TV is currently inundated with working-class, white-guy reality shows. Top-drawing, relatively low-cost realities showcase gold miners, oil drillers, hunters, locomotive drivers, off-the-grid backwoods eccentrics, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86],"tags":[1025,63,645,914],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1MP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10386,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10386-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":6871,"position":0},"title":"From an Angry Reader: Hello\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 13, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"From an Angry Reader: Hello Dr. Hanson, While it's hard to argue with \"be happy day by day\", our current form of capitalism - which Hoover seems to endorse - makes that near impossible. Over the last 30 years, Friedman's nutty idea of maximizing shareholder value as the only responsibility\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6876,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/pajama-boy-nation\/","url_meta":{"origin":6871,"position":1},"title":"Pajama Boy Nation","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 6, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Will Kane of\u00a0High Noon\u00a0Pajama Boy wasn\u2019t. Somehow we as a nation went from the iconic Marlboro Man to Pajama Boy \u2014 from the noble individual with a bad habit to the ignoble without a good habit \u2014 without a blink in between. 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Can the lack of connect to reality of racialism go on? At the end, they discuss Hunter as blackmail\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 5 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 5 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-traditionalist-damned-if-you-do\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9482,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-politics-and-our-sexual-schizophrenia\/","url_meta":{"origin":6871,"position":3},"title":"Trump, Politics, and Our Sexual Schizophrenia","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0Conservatives should know better than to so quickly validate a dishonest narrative that benefits the other side. By Bruce Thornton \/\/ Front Page Magazine Online \u00a0 A few minutes into Sunday\u2019s debate Donald Trump\u2019s decade-old crude sexual banter with a reporter from an entertainment show was mentioned by the CNN\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4774,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/grammatical-gymnastics-at-the-new-yorker-magazine\/","url_meta":{"origin":6871,"position":4},"title":"Grammatical Gymnastics at the New Yorker Magazine","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 5, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers In a recent review of Donald Kagan\u2019s\u00a0The Peloponnesian War, and my\u00a0Autumn of War, (\"Theatres of War:\u00a0 Why the battles over ancient Athens still rage\u201d\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0Magazine, [January 12, 2004]), the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn\u00a0 says that I believe that it is immoral to suggest defeat can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2004"","block_context":{"text":"March 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/march-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5202,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/troubling-facts-of-the-paris-riots\/","url_meta":{"origin":6871,"position":5},"title":"Troubling “Facts” of the Paris Riots","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 6, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"How our newspapers might turn bias to balance. by Bruce S. 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showcase gold miners, oil drillers, hunters, locomotive drivers, off-the-grid backwoods eccentrics, fishermen,\u00a0crabmen, truck drivers, ax men, moonshiners, or the new generation of Beverly Hillbillies. The list of the particular subspecies of the muscular classes is endless.<\/p>\n