A 93-year-old man who was attacked with a soda can and beaten nearly unconscious managed to shoot his assailant dead in the seconds between the last blow of soda and unconsciousness, and the whole thing was filmed by a traffic camera. A cat alone in a house that was being burglarized dialed the police and the thieves were caught after the in-home security system replayed the scene. A rapist who attacks everyone indifferent of age, sex or size was spotted in several cities at once by amateur videographers who just happened to be peeping in windows. Also spotted in several cities by the same video window-peepers were adults watching the same television shows wearing nothing but diapers. The same snooping devices that caught the diapered people were responsible for the entire season of new television shows being watched: shows about kitchen workers caught putting cockroaches in the food, having sex over tables full of chopped vegetables; baby sitters using the toothbrushes of the family that employed them for indecent purposes; priests beating their wives; construction workers peeing off high-beams onto pedestrians; children putting sand in sandwiches, etc. The "etceteras" are very important because they are about people in sensitive jobs doing awful things that endanger everyone's security. Left alone, the surveilled people who didn't know they were being surveilled did two kinds of things: disgusting ones that can make anyone laugh and horrible things that should be punished.
Both the disgusting and the outright felonious were equally divided between the television networks for next season's shows. The only editing that these "caught-on-camera" shows receive is being recast as contests. For example, the show about catching children putting sand in sandwiches features a celebrity jury that awards a prize to the child who puts the most sand in a sandwich and watches his victim eat the whole thing. Same goes for baby sitters with toothbrushes etc. Awards by celebrity juries go to a host of misdemeanors uncovered by an increasing number of surveillance methods. Cameras the size of eye lashes are being attached to dog and shirt collars, skirt hems and the tips of shoes. The potential for uncovering surprising private behaviors and making money out of them is unlimited.
The only problem is finding celebrities, because there is still only a limited number of them available for judging contests. However, as the surveillance reality shows advance to the next season, more celebrities will be produced from the winners of these reality shows. Winners of such shows attain instant celebrity and are immediately drafted to judge new shows. The competition between the advancing surveillance technology and the increase in celebrities is going to be its own reality show in the near future. We are far from the days of America's Funniest Home Videos and deep into the hallucinating summer of Bush-era postmodernism, the so-called Gonzales season, on land, on sea and on television.
Andrei Codrescu's latest book is New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing From the City (Algonquin Books).
