On Point: 'Survivor: The Gutter'

Published August 25, 2006 at midnight

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It's a joke, right? TV's next Survivor will divide its tribes by race and ethnic group: white, black, Hispanic, Asian. Host Jeff Probst said the show wanted to "try something new."

It's not a joke, of course. It's sheer marketing genius. And if it's also a bit disgusting - well, what's an aging reality show to do? Given a choice between a shrinking audience and the chance to reach more viewers by stoking racial friction, you just knew Hollywood would take the high road.

"CBS fully recognizes the controversial nature of this format, but has full confidence in the producers and their ability to produce the program in a responsible manner," the network said this week. CBS means it has full confidence in the producers' ability to locate a few loutish contestants who in the heat of battle will not fail to unleash a Mel Gibson-type rant and drive up ratings.

But what if Survivor's brain trust was too clever by half? What if even many die-hard fans are put off by the unspoken invitation to root for their own color-coded "tribe"?

White Americans in particular have been conditioned to suppress any hint of racial pride. Maybe they'll balk at the network's attempt to put them on the spot.

Maybe. But Survivor has rarely placed a bad bet on the state of popular culture. Racial rivalry sounds like yet another hit.

Israel on its own

"Israel is carefully watching the world's reaction to Iran's continued refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, with some high-level officials arguing it is now clear that when it comes to stopping Iran, Israel 'may have to go it alone,' The Jerusalem Post has learned."

May have to go it alone?

In different circumstances, the United States might have been the one country besides Israel willing to lead such a strike. But given the public reaction against the Iraqi mire, it's hard to see how President Bush would be willing to take on such a venture - even in "the spring or summer of 2008," which is when The Jerusalem Post speculates it still could be done.

Meanwhile, the countdown goes on. In December 2001, former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani reminded worshippers at a Tehran mosque that "the use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while (the same) against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable." More recently, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for wiping Israel off the map.

Faced with such threats, we hardly need "high-level officials" to tell us that Israel "may have to go it alone."

The hegemony of the car

Urban planners dedicated to increasing the density of American cities to aid mass transit rarely tell us what it would really take "to get people out of their cars."

That's because cities where people are much more likely to ride trains or buses, or walk, are usually not just slightly more dense than the typical U.S. metro area. They are more dense by an order of magnitude that U.S. cities will never approach.

Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation recently pointed out a study by urban economist Alain Bertaud that illustrates this mind-boggling disparity. In a Journal of Urban Economics article published several years ago, Bertaud compared the urban footprints of Atlanta and Barcelona, Spain, when each had a population of roughly the same size (2.5 million to 2.8 million). He found that the "average built-up density of the Barcelona metropolitan area" to be 28 times that of Atlanta.

You could force all development in metro Atlanta into existing neighborhoods for the next 20 years and its density still wouldn't come close to Barcelona's.

And by the way, even with Barcelona's impressive density, substantially more than half of the trips taken within it were still by - yes - the dreaded car.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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