The Doctor Is In

The good Dr. Phil has become a staple of US daytime television. It’s probably an unfair and limiting summary of his views, but he seems to primarily and firmly believe in the sanctity of the American nuclear family. He just has trouble finding any.

He irritates me. He’s the latest in a long line of snake oil salesmen, a peculiar staple of American popular culture, who stands up in front of people to tell them why he and his family lead a perfect life and how, if they would only just listen to him, could do the same. To be fair, some of things he says make good sense; maybe immature teenage morons shouldn’t be getting pregnant and raising children; maybe you shouldn’t spend your last grocery money on lingerie catalogue shopping, especially when you weigh 300 pounds and have cheesies and coke for breakfast.

But if he’s going to save Middle America, he should pick people worthy of saving. I caught a segment one day about a married couple who were having problems in their relationship, and the doc had housed them in a sort of halfway house built for the purpose of marital retreat. The main feature of this house is that it has video cameras everywhere that can record every moment of the couple’s interactions. The immediate cause of marital discord, on this day, was the habit that the wife had of picking up guys at the dance club where she stripped, and subsequently having affairs with them. The latest such guy was in the house on camera to discuss the situation.

I am not making a value judgment on the ethical or moral values of strippers. For most of them, it’s probably just a job. What irritated me about the show was that Phil took a run at the guy she was having an affair with, accusing him of breaking up the nuclear family. That fellow happened to be single, so why was he interfering with a married couple? Phil berated him, basically chased him off the show and out of the house, all to supportive audience applause. Think about it. Some guy walks into a strip bar to check out the action, gets lucky with one of the strippers who takes a liking to him, does the reasonable thing, which is to have sex with her, and now we (the audience) are supposed to believe that he’s the problem. Please. Fifty percent of American marriages fail; get off your high horse, doc. On the face of it, I’d say that splitting up is the best thing that could happen to this particular couple. It doesn’t sound to me like it was meant to be.

I heard about but did not watch another recent episode about a peculiar emerging phenomenon, branding. People get together, put irons in a fire, and burn brands on each other’s skin, like they do with cattle in westerns. When the doc asked one of the participants why he did this, the fellow replied that he and his friends didn’t have anything better to do and he wanted to feel what it was like to be branded.

I think that shows like Dr. Phil’s and other similar ones on television should have a little graph at the bottom of the screen, showing the gradual steady decline in the quality of the human gene pool.