"Bonanza is Disgusting (Kid Nation)", 10-24-2007

This episode of Kid Nation begins with a new Town Council. In the last episode, "Viva La Revolucion!", the kids were given the chance to vote for some new leadership. Laurel from the "Green District" ran unopposed, and Anjay from the Blue District had no trouble defeating Olivia, but there were two new sheriffs in town.

The first was Guylan, a sweet long-haired little kid who beat the somewhat obnoxious and full of himself Mike by a 9-1 vote to become leader of the Red District. The other was Zach, who won a narrow 5-4 vote to oust catchphrase-spouting beauty queen Taylor from the yellow district.

The task of the new Town Council is a simple one -- clean up the mess. When you live in a room, you only have 10 feet x 10 feet of space in some cases to make tidy, but the part-time residents of Bonanza City seem to have let their trash fall where it may. The Council has the bright idea (or is the producer's stick poking them again?) to clean up the mess, to take the town trash far away from the town proper and bury it somewhere.

Frankly, the current in-town trash bin is a mess, complete with a rat crawling about. Once again, I'm suspecting the rat is some sort of "stunt rat" brought in, a 37-year old rat with an agent an a house in Malibu. If there was a rat problem in Bonanza City, don't you think we would have seen it by now?

Rat left aside, the new leaders nominate members from each of their teams to involunarily serve on trash detail. In some cases -- big kids like the 15-year old Greg -- the choice is made for practical reasons. In the case of the Yellow District, another aspect comes into consideration.

Zach nominates Taylor and Leila for trash detail. The yellow team girls have already formed a clique under Taylor and have picked up her habits of laziness, and have generally let whatever duties they're given fall to the wayside to do whatever ten year old girls do. In their case, they've been given this nastiest of missions strictly as punishment.

Taylor stomps her feet. Neither of them are doing any trash detail. Members of the Town Council cajole, plead, beg, and threaten, but Taylor refuses to budge. After all, it's not like these are her parents or anything. What are they going to make her do? What kind of clout do they have?

Undoubtedly, the Council members have learned a few tricks from their parents. The first trick is that an unknown is more threatening than a known. The two are told that their punishment will be decided later, and the council gets on with their work.

This implicit threat is enough to bring Leila around. Leila parts from Taylor -- who appears miffed -- and shows up at the trash detail. Taylor's punishment, meanwhile, remains undetermined.

There are other things going on in this episode -- Guylan finds that he has neither the size nor strength to do his part in the digging, and is acutely embarrassed -- but I'll focus on Taylor for this write-up as the producers want to draw our attention there, anyway.

Many of the kids in town take it upon themselves to clean the dishes and the messes in the kitchen that the Yellow District never bothered to clean when Taylor was in charge. However, there's a problem -- water has to be brought in from a pump, and the water has run out. More water will have to be pumped.

Taylor's punishment is finally determined -- she'll have to replenish the water supply single-handedly. She pumps a couple of buckets, complaining all the way about what a dictatorship it is and why is everybody mean to her and so forth. On the way back, her temper gets the best of her and she dumps out the water in the presence of the town's leading citizens -- she's not doing any more work.

After much more argument, Zach levies the only punishments of practical value that he can think of. Since Zach is in charge of dispursing the money for team members when they win a placement in a "class" after the weekly Survivor-like competitions, he cuts off Taylor's cash supply. Furthermore, Taylor is out of the running for the gold star that is awarded every three days to a worthy camp member. This gold star is worth $20,000.

I'll zoom to the end of the show. At the end of the town meeting, the kindly adult narrator (or maybe, he's just a very tall 12-year old) asks the kids en masse if any of them wants to go home. Suprisingly, one of the town's leading citizens, 14-year old DK, wants to pack it in. This causes no small amount of shock, and certainly shocks the Town Council, which had decided to award him the gold star before they were caught by surprise by his announcement.

Of course, the adult -- oh hell, let's give him a name. He's Jonathan Karsh, who has actually directed some highly acclaimed documentaries. Karsh asks DK why he wants to go.

DK has a simple, logical reason. He's sick of the drama that certain of the child residents bring with them. Since he misses his parents and siblings, he figures that he could probably experience the same amount of drama with his siblings at home, as opposed to experiencing it out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of brats.

Fortunately, Guylan manages to have some private time with DK. DK is convinced to hang in there, and is surprised when he gets his gold star award. At least, there's a moment of happiness in it all.

(* * *)

A show like "Supernanny" might be shown to kids in high school, to warn them about the dangers of bearing children young. Younger adults -- ones in college, perhaps -- might want to watch "Bonanza is Disgusting" as a cautionary tale. What do you do with a child that won't behave?

There's a school of thought that says that children who misbehave should be spanked. I was spanked as a child, and I'll leave it up to you to determine if my development was completely warped -- I don't blame my parents for it however. Spanking is pain, and you forget pain after about ten minutes.

The town leaders are in the position of parents who do not want to use physical force: how do you get a child to comply if physical force is off the table? Certainly, not naming Taylor's punishment worked as a tactic. The fears you create for yourself can be far worse than any explicit fear -- any good horror movie director knows that. Taylor undoubtedly knows what sort of punishments would be effective, at least in her own mind.

However, this is a situation also like the one of town punks or scofflaws, or bullies in school, or the general asshole you meet at work. You can't just beat people to within an inch of their lives whenever they create drama, and some people are so dense that beating has no effect on them anyway.

Sometimes, you can escape the drama. Like DK, you can simply say, "okay, I've had it" and walk off. You can change jobs, or not go to certain places, or move, or just get new friends. For most people, this isn't an option and adults can't just move across town and change their address whenever little Tiffany acts up.

How do you create a social control mechanism that isn't outright oppression, or backed with the threat of violence?

One effective way could be that of shunning. A lesser form of shunning is used by adults: when a child is sent to the "time out" corner or is sent to his room to think about what he has done. Taylor is already wildly unpopular among certain segments of the Bonanza City Community, a Town Council meeting stating that Taylor is to be "shunned" might have some effect on her.

Shunning has a long history that stretches all the way back to the ostracism of the ancient Greeks, when persons from the community could be exiled by community vote for ten years. It was used by the ancient Christians, and modern religious groups as well -- it might go by other names such as "disfellowshipping" or "banning". Kids are very influenced by what their peers think of them, and if Taylor got the message that her act wasn't pleasing anyone, she might make a turnaround. If the kids said, "we don't want to talk with you and don't want to play with you and don't want to be with you until you change," then change might happen.

Of course, this would require some unanimous and resolute action among the kids -- Taylor already had influence over the other girls of the Yellow District, who might decide to further enable her in some way. For shunning to work, the one shunned must lack any other support system. Furthermore, you can never tell if such an action would just turn Taylor into an outlaw for good, or scar her for life in some way.

Like it or not, Taylor is just a problem the kids in Bonanza City will have to deal with, the same way we have to deal with the Taylors in our own lives. My claim is that sometimes, it's just a good thing to break off contact with negative people. The sad thing is that it's not that simple, and reality television does its best to make it as difficult as possible.