When You Breed Jerry Springer With Pawn Stars
At the Wall Street Journal American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks recounts his own journey experiencing both Spanish socialism and the modern American version of poverty-lite:
At age 19, I dropped out of school to pursue a career as a French horn player. After a few twists and turns, I wound up in the Barcelona Symphony, which was a Spanish government job.
Even as a foreigner, I had the same lifetime work status as a clerk at the water department. Nobody ever left these jobs, except with lavish disability packages. (One colleague who injured his lips moonlighting at a dance-hall gig ended up spending the next 20 years collecting a full salary to stay home.)
I loved music—but the life of a government functionary wasn’t my cup of tea. And so my Spanish wife and I decided to pull up stakes and start over in America. Neither of us had a college degree, and my wife’s English was limited.
To friends in Barcelona, this move was ridiculous. Quitting a job in Spain often meant permanent unemployment. As we departed, my in-laws tearfully gave us a gold bracelet which, they said, we could pawn in the coming hard times.
We were fairly poor for a few years but just fine. I taught music during the day and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at night. To her astonishment, my wife immediately landed a job teaching English to other immigrants. “America is a great country,” she declared—an assertion I had never heard from a Spaniard.
But where might they have gone to pawn that gold bracelet?
My wife April and I regarded TruTV’s Hardcore Pawn with suspicion and hesitation. We’ve appreciated the History Channel’s Pawn Stars for a long time now, laughing at the the antics of the Las Vegas family of pawn brokers and the historical curiosities that waltzed into the shop.
But with Hardcore Pawn the customers didn’t waltz with treasures, more often they stumble and swagger with junk. On Hardcore Pawn Les Gold and his two adult children Seth and Ashley need a dozen security officers to maintain order in their giant downtown Detroit pawn emporium.
Hardcore Pawn eschews the Americana and historical trivia for Jerry Springer-style cracker culture theatrics. On Pawn Stars when a customer learns their valuable item is actually a fraud worth nothing the worst that happens is they leave muttering to themselves. On Hardcore Pawn customers often insist on receiving money regardless of the item’s worth, threaten violence if their demands aren’t met, and in some cases blatantly try to defraud the store.
So yes, it’s an addictive show (I admit with a measure of shame.) Each sequence brings new surprises and bizarre characters one hopes are played by actors. But who we all know probably are not.
It’s the entitlement mentality on display in its most fully cultivated form.
Brooks touched on a crucial ingredient of this this in his piece:
The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.
During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”
Brooks’s solution to problem comes in his new book, The Road to Freedom.
It’s the entitlement mentality on display in its most fully cultivated form. Ding, winner!. Well, not the mouthy sista looking to gets da dough to get her man’s bail. And Derbyshire was let go from NR for specifically bringing this to the fore. Yet, the racist AG of the United States can speak of “my people” without retribution.
Derbyshire made the idiotic error of dragging intelligence and other non-factors into his argument. He got what he deserved, even if some of what he brought to the fore needs to be talked about.
(And before you start: tell me why Pakistan is a basketcase while India is an up-and-coming country. Same people, different *culture*. You could apply this dichotomy to blue state and red state America, too, or are people living in blue states of far-below-average IQ? Like, say, Maine versus New Hampshire, where both are basically 95%+ white, but one is, by every measure, *far* more successful than the other. And they’re *right next to* one another (also see: California versus Texas for the same thing on the super-large scale, but both with huge minority populations). It’s the *culture*, stupid, not the disparity in intellect. When ‘black America’ bought into the American Dream, prior to the disastrous (and wholly intentional knee-capping by LBJ et al to lock up the black vote) of the Great Society, they were integrating and making massive inroads into the middle class.)
First off, American Jewelry & Loan is not in “downtown Detroit”. If it was a block farther north, it wouldn’t even be inside the Detroit city limits. When the show opening says “In the heart of Detroit’s Eight Mile” that should give you a clue that it’s right on the city’s northern border.
Secondly, much of the show is ginned up for the cameras. I’ve been to the shop looking for used cameras and projectors and the last time there I watched the show crew filming a customer in the parking lot, essentially feeding him lines to say on camera.
Much of the conflict between Seth and Ashley is also exaggerated, according to what one of the store managers told me. Seth Gold has also spiked some incidents from appearing on the show because they make Detroit look even worse than what gets on the air.
In a recent episode, a customer said something to Les that enraged him and he came out from behind the counter and personally threw the customer out saying something like “you can’t come into my store and call me that”, but they beeped whatever was said. From Gold’s visceral reaction (he normally lets his bouncers do the escorting) my guess is that the bleeped remark was something anti-semitic. There are ethnic and racial currents just below the surface and they do bubble up sometimes on the show. It’s not like some black folks don’t casually play the race card.
The learned helplessness and sense of entitlement Dave mentioned is on display on the show with customers demanding they’ll be paid a certain amount to pawn or sell something, as if the store is obligated to give them money.
Though Les and his kids recoil at the suggestion that they cheat their customers, there’s no question that they take advantage of and exploit desperate people. The sales are voluntary transactions, to be sure, but with all the caveats of reality tv, I’ve never seen them offer fair market value on anything but precious metal value in jewelry.
A lady came in to get her husband’s jewelry out of pawn but when he pawned it, he put an ID hold on the account, meaning only he could redeem them. It was her husband’s birthday so the lady was disappointed. Instead of just telling her to come back with her husband, Ashley, realizing the lady had cash to pay off the loan, managed to talk her into buying him a watch. The store made a profit off of the watch, the items are still in pawn, meaning revenue from the loan, and there’s still the possibility that the items won’t be paid off and the store will end up owning them. Ashley made it seem as she did a great thing helping the customer go home happy with a gift for her hubby, but it was pretty exploitative.