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Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Nine: We Who Are About to Die Salute You
By Bill Vaughn
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Pathfinder Video
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You could see it in their eyes, the stunned and helpless gaze of deer frozen by the headlights of a speeding truck on a jungle road. At the wheel of this relentless vehicle, this supercharged hum-vee that swerves not nor slows one whit for any poor critter wandering the night, is the ancient mariner, Rudy Boesch, force-marching Klub Rudy through the dark to
a place that's bright. This time it was the blubbery and camera-loving Jenna Lewis who made the mistake of getting in the way. The splat sound she made when propelled from the island by Rudy's powerful Tagi alliance will haunt Sean Kenniff all the days of his life, for it was the obtuse neurologist's spavined "plan," his ejectile voting based solely on the
alphabet, that sealed Jenna's fate.
Klub Rudy ruled the night yet again even though one of its co-conspirators has jumped from the vehicle. The wishy-washy Kelly Wigglesworth, the 23-year-old river guide who apparently has still not regained her senses after getting creamed in the rowing contest by the wastrel Gervase Peterson, decided that her best interests lay in Girl Power, the shadowy
alliance of Colleen and Jenna, especially after the sisterhood caught its first fish in a crab pot and began dancing around in matching tank tops.
"I thought about a female alliance," the Rudester mused, "and watching them walk around hand in hand I even thought about lesbianism." Was he alarmed by the rise of a competing alliance? "It could happen if they had enough brains," he said. "But I don't think they got enough brains."
With each episode Rudy grows stronger. On July 26 he won the immunity challenge by whipping everyone else in a game of go that employed human bodies instead of counters. When he was awarded the immunity necklace and gazed happily at the jungly talisman at its center, I saw a man smiling all the way to the bank. Yet he doesn't crow about his successes,
nor does he cease his service to Tribe Rattana—he keeps the campfire going at Rowdy Rudy's Cafe and boils the rice three times a day. And he still understands that in the face of so much Rattana deviance, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Take, for example Richard Hatch's decision to spend his 39th birthday in his birthday suit, although he finally threw something on when the others complained about his butt crack. "When I go home," Rudy said, "and my wife asks me who was with you I'll say a queer who ran around bare-assed half the time."
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Unless Sean finally sees the poverty of his alphabet strategy Klub Rudy will simply pile their votes onto his, and it will be the traitor, Kelly, who'll get thumped in next week's episode (still, hon, it's better than getting your kneecaps broken by Rudy).
And check out the product placement in the July 26 episode, the bottles of Bud Lite prominently displayed at the reward barbecue Colleen won for herself and her newest bestest soul-mate, Jenna. Again, Producer Mark Burnett has some nerve scolding me on Phoenix radio for trying to get the players drunk with Bombay gin when I stormed the island. (My
initial strategy when I applied to be a contestant was to smuggle in vintner's yeast on or in my person, in order to make fruit wine for everyone, and thus as tribal Boozemaster to control the island. But Burnett is now laying just as much booze on these "starving" people as I would have, and is thus controlling the island himself using my own alcohol
strategy. Maybe I should find an attorney and sue for theft of intellectual property.)
And speaking of the guy who claims to be a former paratrooper in the British army, Burnett describes the process of eliminating contestants on Survivor as "social Darwinism." That's a dandy conceit, of course, as long as the bootees are sweet old ladies like Sonja or crazy old coots like B.B. But Klub Rudy has already ejected three of Rattana's strongest
pillars. Eating the fittest bears no resemblance to the animal societies Darwin saw from the Beagle, and Survivor looks less like the institutional victimization of the weak that thrives under capitalism than it does the subjugation of the strong that is the hallmark of the dictatorship of the proletariat that festers under communism.
In East Malaysia you can see both sorts of economies thriving—each one marked by an opposing tradition in building styles. For example, there's the Central Market in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah. Here are a couple acres of covered booths packed with locals and the occasional foreigner haggling over everything from exotic melons and
weird spices and dried beasts from the ocean to the pearls I bought my wife, Kitty. The market lies firmly in the tin-roofed shanty style of Malaysian "architecture" (although the country boasts the tallest building in the world and is now fabricating the world's longest). The variations are only twofold—boxy concrete slabs, or shacks on stilts built
in swamps or polluted tidal basins, which the Malaysians refer to as "water villages" without any apparent irony. An exception to this squalor is the traditional longhouse built by indigenous communal peoples in northwest Borneo such as the Rungus. Their longhouses, whose steep-pitched roofs are thatched, all face the sacred summit of Mount Kinabalu. In a
gesture to the beauty and functionality of these buildings the vast lobby of the elegant Magellan Sutera Hotel in KK is built along the lines of a longhouse, open to the sea and the mountains on either end, filled with the sound of gongs blowing in the sultry breezes, which are perfumed with the smell of salt water and tropical blossoms.
Next week, I'll finally get to some thoughts on Malaysian food that I promised in last week's column.
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