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7th Heaven Does Sudan
May. 3rd, 2004 10:46 pm7th Heaven has sensitively dealt with many pressing issues of today: the Taliban, rap music, the connection between homosexuality and child abuse, how smoking cigarettes will cause you to burn down your house and how smoking pot will result in you and your bike being run over by a car, with everyone, including your grief-stricken parents, agreeing that it was your fault, because of the pot. But tonight 7th Heaven tackled the Issue of Sudanese refugees.
Allow me to reproduce a fraction of the dialogue verbatum, because it is priceless:
[Context: Ruthie, the phenotypically biracial, presumably adopted daughter of the Waspy Camden parents, unnatural sibling to her Aryan-looking step-spawn, has managed to get lost on a field trip to the zoo, along with her dumb, rodential boyfriend. They have managed to take five wrong buses in their attempts to get to a train station, because they are stupid, and have consequently run out of money. Ruthie executive-decides to ask for help and approaches two young men heading in her direction, despite her boyfriend's stirrings of macho concern, because the guys are, like, black. Well, what do you expect when they live in a town of Glenoak that's whiter than the KKK special powwow retreat in the Bible Belt, with the only exception being a black police officer (whose big secret is that his brother is in jail, natch) and his family that has a bizzarre, almost Biblical structural correspondence to the Camdens in the number of children, and their respective ages and genders.]
Ruthie: Hi! I am Ruthie. And this is my friend Peter. We're from Glenoak and we are lost.
Boy #1: I'm Jacob. And this is Nikodemos. We are from Sudan, and they call us the lost boys.*
In the next fifteen minutes, they all bond, after Ruthie and Peter tell the Lost Boys about how they had to walk for several hours in a row, and all they had to eat all day was two hot dogs, and the Lost Boys tell them about how their kin was slaughtered and they had to walk across Sudan to Ethiopia, then back across Sudan to Kenya, eating leaves and mud. But now it's all good because they are in America. Because they were rescued by Americans, just like they rescued Ruthie and Peter. Are you getting the parallels?
Miracle of miracles, the soon-to-be-exoticized Lost Boys have a cell phone, which they loan to Ruthie. She calls her father, RevCam, who, upon hearing that she is with the Lost Boys, repeats several times: "you are in good hands." Because, apparently, all Lost Boys from Sudan are noble savages. Wait a minute, Ruthie didn't explain the Sudan part. Maybe RevCam thinks his daughter is kicking it with Peter Pan & Co.
Upon a safe return home, Ruthie, overwhelmed with emotion tells her father that the Lost Boys' story was "terrible...but also wonderful." The fuck? And finally, RevCam delivers the episode-concluding sermon, peppered with a few facts about "the Sudan," encourages everyone to appreciate every moment of their American privilege in a gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may-by-way-of-suffering-in-the-Dark-Continent-contrast, and leaves us all to ponder Nikodemos' quote: "Maybe I am a lost boy, but I was never lost...to God." Amen. Oy.
*For the record, yes, I know that Sudanese orphans are referred to in the media as the lost boys. There's the recent documentary, The Lost Boys, which I haven't seen, but I hear is worth seeing, and the one from a couple of years ago, Benjamin and his Brother, directed by Arthur Howes, which I saw at the Mead festival, and it's definitely worth seeing. So I'm not making fun of the term--it's just upon incorporation into the 7th Heaven universe, the term starts to seem really insane. But then again, 7th Heaven can make everything completely insane, through a classical strategy of ostranenie. Shklovsky would be so proud.
Allow me to reproduce a fraction of the dialogue verbatum, because it is priceless:
[Context: Ruthie, the phenotypically biracial, presumably adopted daughter of the Waspy Camden parents, unnatural sibling to her Aryan-looking step-spawn, has managed to get lost on a field trip to the zoo, along with her dumb, rodential boyfriend. They have managed to take five wrong buses in their attempts to get to a train station, because they are stupid, and have consequently run out of money. Ruthie executive-decides to ask for help and approaches two young men heading in her direction, despite her boyfriend's stirrings of macho concern, because the guys are, like, black. Well, what do you expect when they live in a town of Glenoak that's whiter than the KKK special powwow retreat in the Bible Belt, with the only exception being a black police officer (whose big secret is that his brother is in jail, natch) and his family that has a bizzarre, almost Biblical structural correspondence to the Camdens in the number of children, and their respective ages and genders.]
Ruthie: Hi! I am Ruthie. And this is my friend Peter. We're from Glenoak and we are lost.
Boy #1: I'm Jacob. And this is Nikodemos. We are from Sudan, and they call us the lost boys.*
In the next fifteen minutes, they all bond, after Ruthie and Peter tell the Lost Boys about how they had to walk for several hours in a row, and all they had to eat all day was two hot dogs, and the Lost Boys tell them about how their kin was slaughtered and they had to walk across Sudan to Ethiopia, then back across Sudan to Kenya, eating leaves and mud. But now it's all good because they are in America. Because they were rescued by Americans, just like they rescued Ruthie and Peter. Are you getting the parallels?
Miracle of miracles, the soon-to-be-exoticized Lost Boys have a cell phone, which they loan to Ruthie. She calls her father, RevCam, who, upon hearing that she is with the Lost Boys, repeats several times: "you are in good hands." Because, apparently, all Lost Boys from Sudan are noble savages. Wait a minute, Ruthie didn't explain the Sudan part. Maybe RevCam thinks his daughter is kicking it with Peter Pan & Co.
Upon a safe return home, Ruthie, overwhelmed with emotion tells her father that the Lost Boys' story was "terrible...but also wonderful." The fuck? And finally, RevCam delivers the episode-concluding sermon, peppered with a few facts about "the Sudan," encourages everyone to appreciate every moment of their American privilege in a gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may-by-way-of-suffering-in-the-Dark-Continent-contrast, and leaves us all to ponder Nikodemos' quote: "Maybe I am a lost boy, but I was never lost...to God." Amen. Oy.
*For the record, yes, I know that Sudanese orphans are referred to in the media as the lost boys. There's the recent documentary, The Lost Boys, which I haven't seen, but I hear is worth seeing, and the one from a couple of years ago, Benjamin and his Brother, directed by Arthur Howes, which I saw at the Mead festival, and it's definitely worth seeing. So I'm not making fun of the term--it's just upon incorporation into the 7th Heaven universe, the term starts to seem really insane. But then again, 7th Heaven can make everything completely insane, through a classical strategy of ostranenie. Shklovsky would be so proud.
