The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 03
“I don’t give a fudge what anybody thinks.” - Knight
Despite what many people think, Mardi Gras isn’t some devil weed that transforms ordinary people into stark-raving-mad lunatics who drunkenly lurch around New Orleans fueled by an insatiable thirst for cheap, plastic beads and their own depraved desperation. While the level and frequency of one’s intoxication may be slightly above average for the two or so weeks that parades run down St. Charles Avenue, the scale of Mardi Gras debauchery seldom reaches wide-scale and wanton corruption of moral decency.
The true phenomenon was very accurately documented in the episode of Treme that was set on Fat Tuesday proper. Even though alcohol and drug use was prevalent, few - if any - of the characters behaved in a way that was totally unexpected. Sure, the drinkers started drinking earlier, the smokers smoked more often and the cokeheads did coke under less sanitary conditions, but even the expanded revelry for which the season is notorious was shown to have limits. Mardi Gras is crazy and people do cut loose, but the mere fact that Easter is nigh does not turn virgins into sluts, sluts into boozehounds or boozehounds into crackheads.
Given the fact that no one had to be rushed to the hospital or took part in a PCP fueled street orgy, I’d say MTV has given the holiday a pretty fair shake so far. There was, however, something about this week’s episode that I did manage to find extremely troubling.
The discourse surrounding the “Jemmye Losing Her ‘White Boy V-Card’ to Knight” subplot has adopted a bizarre and somewhat uncomfortable tone. What started as the perfect excuse to rattle off some immeasurably witty and original tropes about the effect a black man’s penis may or may not have on the vagina of a white woman is beginning to take the shape of a weird, ad-hoc editorial on interracial relationships. I’ve heard “Once you go black, you never go back” and recognize that as far as apothegms go, this one lands on the more innocuous end of the spectrum. But outside of History Channel documentaries about Hitler Youth rallies, I can’t definitively say that I’ve heard a human being proclaim “White is right” before McKenzie’s friend Suze said as much in this week’s episode.
Am I reading too far into this? Of course I am. I mean, what is the point of watching The Real World at the ripe age of 26 if not to self-righteously use it as an extended metaphor for the unfettered decline of western civilization. But we’ve already heard one roommate claim that physical contact with homosexuals makes him suicidal, so excuse me if I am worried where a questionable, yet recurring topic of conversation may lead considering it most recently featured one Caucasian member of a reality television cast saying “White is right in general” as a few other Caucasian members of the cast nodded in solemn agreement. Anyway…
I spied Avenue Pub, Republic, LePhare, New York Pizza, The Metro and (of course) The Beach on Bourbon. I also made this diagram (which borrows its format from New York Magazine’s indispensable Approval Matrix):
