Love, the Commodity

By Crispin Sartwell

When the current spate of reality romance shows got underway, I was among the snobs and doomsayers who believed that it was the end of all things good and decent.

In the state our culture - or, as our president whimsically calls it, "our sacred way of life" - there is nothing that is not a commodity and an entertainment. Obviously you can purchase sex and the spectacle of sex; in fact 87 solicitations arrive daily in my email inbox. If, on the other hand, I'm in the market for a vicious, bloody beat-down, I need only hop on the satellite pay-per-view and check out the ultimate fighting championships.

Things we've managed to transform into commodities, and make subject to the vast machinery of marketing: water, animal attacks, enlightenment, health, education, crime, beauty. Thank God slavery is still illegal, or we'd have to sit through television advertisements for bucks and breeders.

One would have thought, however, that love - that ineffable, mysterious force that has been identified with God, with all things good, with what is highest and purest in each of us - could not actually be peddled like Pepsi. One would, of course, have been wrong.

Indeed, it seems more in keeping with human decency and dignity to watch Christians ripped apart by lions than to watch people fall in love for money and fame. That suffering sells is just kind of a disgusting testimony to human perversity, but when you've reached the point of marketing love, you've put yourself well beyond hope into the annihilation of everything that has any tendency to redeem us.

And yet last week's finales of "The Bachelorette and "Joe Millionaire" have me rethinking my sad cynicism, and toying with the notion that our sacred way of life may be worth killing Arabs for after all.

Trista Rehn faced a primal choice: rugged Colorado firefighter or "smooth-talking, brilliantined account executive." Would it be cash and grooming products, or the poetry of sheer heroism? She went firefighter.

Meanwhile over at Joe Millionaire, Evan Marriot came down to an equally fundamental human dilemma: good girl/bad girl, "bondage film actress"/ "substitute teacher." In fact Sarah Kozer's great pleasure in life is caring for the elderly, and she intends to use her cash winnings to aid an aunt who is undergoing chemotherapy.

What this teaches us is not necessarily that we're still decent people, but at least this: that we still have some shame. Maybe we don't really want to love and marry good people. But we certainly don't want to appear on national television choosing money and bondage over the tokens of human goodness.

This speaks well for us, and our sacred way of life. And even if we've left fundamental human values far behind, we still remember - albeit a bit vaguely - what they are. As long as we remember what they are it may be that we could find them again somewhere.

When it comes time to simulate the highest human yearnings on television in order to generate advertising revenue, we at least have an idea of how we'd go about it: that is, something deep inside us actually remembers what the highest human yearnings are.

Probably we also vaguely remember that love doesn't really work this way: that it isn't a contest, a sweepstakes, an entertainment, an advertisement, a way to dominate the sweeps. But you can tell that we still have some idea of what the real thing would look like were it possible. So maybe even the marketing of love has something to teach us about its irrationality and purity, and about how deeply we still want it.