aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, June 16, 2005

30 Days

Morgan Spurlock’s new show on FX turns the 30 Days concept of Super Size Me into a weekly affair. The first episode was on last night. It follows Spurlock and his fiancée, Alex, as they move to Ohio and try to live off minimum-wage jobs. 

Columbus just happens to be Brew’s hometown:

Morgan and his fiancee got a little taste of what the real working poor experience in Ohio these days. And it’s bad. They settle in “The Bottoms” - a poor Appalachian neighborhood on the western flood plains of the Scioto River. For 30 days, they struggle just to get by, confronted by crippling hospital bills, working two jobs - walking to save a couple of dollars a day in bus fares.

When I was a kid - most of Ohio was working class. A little down on it’s luck from time to time, sure. Things were pretty bad in the late seventies and early eighties. I remember my Dad working more than one job sometime around then. But it was always “gettin’ by” even if only just.

When I went back to Ohio in October - I was shocked. It’s bad, really bad. The economy has tanked, and places that were already a little rough around the edges are now veritable ghost towns - boarded up businesses, tumbledown apartments, scattered fast food joints hiding behind halogen lights and bulletproof glass.

Ohio is among the states where the minimum wage is below the federal minimum; Think Progress serves up some facts behind the minimum wage.

Too bad I don’t have cable. In a Salon interview Spurlock discusses an upcoming episode I’d like to see:

We also do one about sexuality in America, where we take a guy who’s ex-military, somebody who has a very straightforward view of what homosexuals are—these are people who are sinning against God, this is a sin against nature, these are people who are going to hell because of the choices they make, they are choosing to defy God. And so we take this guy from Michigan, where he grew up, and we moved him to California, to the Castro [in San Francisco], where he moved in with a gay man and really got a firsthand look at what gay culture is like. The stereotypes that he had aren’t what it is.