The original series Roots was a phenomenon.  With maybe more viewers as a percentage of population than any TV event in history.  When it aired some forty years ago, I and everybody I knew had their eyes glued to the screen.  The various episodes made for the only water cooler talk the next day.  However, this time around, nobody I know seems plugged in, despite it running on seven* cable channels at once. 

I’m certainly not.  Because remember the old joke:

Man has a flat tire in the middle of the night.  Under a streetlamp he gets his spare out, jacks his car up, removes the lug nuts from the affected tire and carefully puts them in the hubcap.  Then he accidentally kicks the hubcap, and all four nuts roll down a sewer grate.

“Oh, no!  What am I going to do?”  He clutches his head.

“Pssst.”  The man looks up and finds he’s in front of a huge brick building with a sign on it saying County Home For Morons.  In a darkened upstairs window there’s a man in hospital pajamas who tells him, “What you should do, buddy, is take one nut off each of the three remaining wheels and use them to get home.”

“Wow, what a great solution,” the man replies, “but...but how come someone like you can think of that?”

“Well,” the figure in the upstairs window answers, affronted, “I might be a moron, but I’m not an idiot.”

Not being idiots, we understand that Roots has been revealed, as Stanley Crouch put it, to be "one of the biggest con jobs in U.S. literary history."  That Alex Haley plagiarized what he didn’t make up and had somebody else write what he didn’t plagiarize.  And so millions of others like me who once accepted his shtick as the truth and nothing but the truth are still furious with ourselves for getting sucked into the phony drama.  And, it goes without saying, still really upset with its producers.   

Feeling cheated as so many of us felt cheated when we never understood the appeal of Steinbeck’s dreary made up stories but enjoyed and foolishly believed that his Travels With Charley was a real one.  The way we were positive JFK had written every word of While England Slept and Profiles in Courage or that Harper Lee had actually authored the book we now know as To Kill A Mockingbird.

One bait-and-switch after another after another, which, at the end of the day, doesn’t seem to annoy anyone except the bamboozled reader/audience.  Puzzling because as Bill Steigerwald, a former journalist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes in Reason Magazine, “[i]f scholars aren’t concerned about this [sort of stuff], what are they scholaring about?”

Who knows?  The publishing and TV industries and the “scholaring” industry may be as bad, as deceptive, as spun, as corrupt as the movie industry, as the MSM, or even as Washington politics.

I dunno what this says about the state of society or about our morals in general.  Or how ridiculously credulous I and others like me are.  Because there are greats like Forrest McDonald, Shelby Foote, Gwyn Jones, Sonia Orwell (and George himself), along with dozens of others, and, being the chumps we are, we keep expecting everybody to measure up.  And so we read or watch something the first time around and believe it.  Myself, I even watched the Megalodon “documentary” and got euchred for an hour.  I admit it.  But that doesn’t mean I’m going to watch the recycled Roots. 

Because I’m not an idiot.

And you can’t make me watch.

Even if you put it on seventy cable channels.

*On my Time Warner Cable lineup: AETVHD  29 & 102, LIFEHD 41 & 170, HISTHD 48 & 107, LMNHD 52

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  See it here.  He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York; blogs here; and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com.