The black t-shirt — so tight, so come-hither. And oh, those safari button-downs — joke-worthy on Eddie Bauer mannequins, but on news correspondents, so ... enticing.
America missed these sartorial seductions, pined for their sweet suggestive nothings. And now, finally, a nation of television addicts can thank its disaster pornographers for bringing back the lurid garments — and the lustful voyeurism they evoke.
Yes, thousands of miles from the San Fernando Valley's seedy studios, the adult entertainment business is alive and panting in Haiti. This year's luminaries aren't the industry's typical muscle-bound mustaches of machismo — they are NBC's Brian Williams pillow-talking to the camera in his Indiana Jones garb, CNN's Sanjay Gupta playing doctor and, of course, CNN's Anderson Cooper in that two-sizes-too-small t-shirt "rarely missing an opportunity to showcase his buff physique," as The New York Times gushed. They are all the disaster porn stars in the media with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads.
And We the Ogling People drink it in.
Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his t-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.
Though neighboring the planet's wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world's poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic — and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.
More:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/david-sirota/our-addiction-to-disaster-porn.html
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