We’ll All Live In Grass Huts!

8:02 pm, 4/26/05

We'll All Live In Grass Huts!
Christopher Kallini has an article on an MTV celebrity show that apparently has to be seen to be believed.

The eco-tourism show, called "Trippin'," premiered on March 28 and was heavily promoted in the runup to Earth Day. The show encourages environmental awareness and lauds traditional tribal lifestyles, which lack running water, electricity and other basic infrastructure.

The MTV series features actress Cameron Diaz and a rotating crew of "her close, personal friends [who] think globally and act globally." They tour developing nations, including Nepal, Bhutan, Tanzania, Honduras and visit remote villages in Chile.

Actress Drew Barrymore, who reportedly earns $15 million a film, told MTV viewers in one episode that after spending time in a primitive, electricity-free Chilean village, "I aspire to be like them more."

Barrymore, apparently enthralled by the lack of a modern sanitary facilities, gleefully bragged, "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

The 32-year-old Diaz, who earns a reported $20-million a movie, boasted that the cow-dung slathered walls of a Nepalese village hut were "beautiful" and "inspiring," and she called the primitive practice of "pounding mud" with sticks to construct a building foundation "the coolest thing."

Diaz also criticized the lifestyles of many Americans after visiting an indigenous village in Chile. "It's kinda gotten out of hand how much convenience we think we need," she said.

Despite the celebrities' praise for the primitive life, "Trippin'" shows them flying on multiple airplanes and chartering at least two helicopters and one boat to reach remote locations over the course of the first four episodes.

The series also showed the celebrities being chauffeured to the airport in a full-size Chevy SUV - despite several on-screen, anti-SUV factoids noting how environmentally unfriendly SUVs are.

Many of these people, living in countries where they break their backs their entire lives on subsistence farms, drop dead at 55, and 10% of their children die at birth, would chew off their own arms for a chance to live in Diaz' or Barrymore's home, or even my home for a season, with central heating and pizza delivery. So, yeah, you girls have fun crapping in the woods like bears and sleeping on parasite-infested "mattresses", surrounded by walls smothered in fresh feces, stacking dirt like the peasants in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, and remember that doing away with all that "extra convenience" is all fun and games until nature, history's greatest monster, comes to murder you. Unlike their peasant friends, when the volcano, predators, plagues, or what have you show up, Diaz and Barrymore both have money with which to buy convenience when it's, well, convenient. Anything goes wrong, they're on a helicopter before the villagers even start screaming, and pretty much any vaccination either Diaz or Barrymore might enjoy is one the villagers will probably never even hear of. Then there are the tribal wars that mark tribal societies, and the associated lovely traditions of massacres, gangrape, and waving people's machete-marked limbs around as trophies.

"My favorite thing about Bhutan is they measure their country's wealth, not based on dollar amount but on gross national happiness," Diaz said.

Actress Eva Mendez, who accompanied Diaz to Nepal and Bhutan, was inspired by the natural beauty of her surroundings: "Nature is so much fun," she said.

Morons. Just ask the tsunami victims in nearby India and Indonesia how much fun nature is: With everything they own obliterated and waiting weeks and months for relief, they can tell you all about it.

"There's something perverse and immoral when multi-millionaire Hollywood celebrities head off on junkets in the jungle - and then preach to us lesser mortals about the joys of the simple life, and how we should protect the Earth, conserve energy, prevent global warming, and help the poorest people on our planet continue 'enjoying' their poverty, malnutrition and premature death," Paul Dreissen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power/Black Death told Cybercast News Service.

"Life in these developing countries is still nasty, brutish and short. And that there is a reason our parents and grandparents worked so hard to create modern homes and hospitals and technologies, so they could leave behind the unsafe water, dung fires, pollution, rotted teeth, infant mortality and life expectancies half or ours," said Driessen.

"This entire MTV series totally glosses over the hardships and premature death that is right before their eyes. Even mentioning these facts would obviously get in the way of their ideological message, and their determination to turn [MTV viewers] into little ventriloquist's dummies for the sustainable development movement," Driessen explained.

That's right. Ironically, Diaz's crew was in fact attacked by a lion in Africa.

"I can hear, I know exactly, like instinctually (it's) the paws of this cat just running," she said, "and I hear this growling and then I hear this 'Aarrrghh'. I was like, 'Was that Tony or Tripp, I'm not sure...' It was one of the lions charging a couple of the guys. They ran like little babies back into the house. I, of course, grabbed my camera and ran outside."

Then the lion saw how thin she was, got bored, and left.

The lion would willingly chew off Diaz's arm for free. "Nature" is almost as much fun for the lion as it is for Diaz, because it has many conveniences available to it which the peasants often do not. That's why we invented "weapons", so that we wouldn't have to be quite so harmonious with nature as to be eaten by it's many delicious creatures, and could instead turn the tables.

Again, morons. (If I seem grumpy today, it's because the neighbor has a new boom car.)

Update: In the comments over at Kallini.com:

And we pleebs will just have to stick with crappy, boring shit like playing Xbox, watching porno on DivX, going target shooting and then driving round to Hardees in our SUVs to eat a Monster Thickburger.

You know what'd be a cooler reality TV show, though? One where they get a bunch of Bhutan & Nepalese villagers and have them live in Diaz & Barrymore's mansions for a month.

Exactly, and in the interest of equal time, I really think Diaz and Barrymore ought to offer their new friends just that opportunity.

Update: Remember Cameron Diaz on Oprah?

"We have a voice now, and we're not using it, and women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies.... If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, and you have a right to say what happens to you and fight off that danger of losing that, then you should vote."

Morons.