NBC News Dateline and Chris Hansen have scored top ratings for their stings "To Catch a Predator" in which they trap Internet child predators on camera. Most of us don't condone adult sex with children - altho a recent spat of blonde female schoolteachers jaunting with their young boy students is looked upon as another case of boys will always be boys, even celebrated in a Charles-&-Diana-style interview on Larry King's CNN broadcast. Men as the adults in these realtions is viewed more serious, and the public has enjoyed watching man after man get scooped up on prime time.
Yet, I remain very troubled by this version of tv justice. Maybe it's the vast array of people from all walks of life. Actors. Clergy. Teachers. Government employees. Upper-end white-collar managers. These can be jaw-dropping moments as we scale the upper end of the class system. The poor are inbred anyway, so we expect nasty behavior from them. Ruthlessly, what we don't conclude about our social codes from this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class parade is troubling. When I was a first-year school teacher, I often made class rules out of a sense of frustration. Invariably, they didn't work: like, demanding absolute silence for silence sake. This is corrosive to a class. You learn as a teacher never to make a rule you cannot enforce. When rules were obviously ludicrous, a product of my naivete, the answer was not to come down harder on the rule but to do away with it and find a new way. Just so, such social codes that make masses of people criminals are equally corrosive to the community: as much as we think we know what child predators look like and have strong social rules against it, that people from literally all walks of life have been caught in NBC's sting should demand, finally, a frank discussion of sex in our society. I found it odd that these men, driving long hours to break the law, cross a line, would bring condoms. There are things here we need to discuss.
But we will not discuss anything, and this is the other most troubling thing about these programs. We enjoy watching the fantasy of the police getting their man, event after event. In the Florida shoot, the police routinely tackle the men the ground in the denouement. Nowhere in the program do we get a sociologist or psychologist speaking to any context of this problem, this crime. We have been trained not to care. We have not, thus far, even gotten a defense lawyer's stand on behalf of their clients: we do not care. This is liberal crap. What would a trial serve since these perverts are clearly guilty? This is the skew of these very, very disruptive programs: show an infraction in a social code which needs to be re-examined and then show the solution in the arms of the police force. Welcome to the makings of a police state.
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