The Duggar Family

At best I live on the margins of popular culture, probably more watching from the grandstand, and through cheap binoculars in the last row in a partially obstructed seat. So it was only today that I learned (on The Today Show, as if happens, by accident) of the Duggar Family. Apparently, the Duggars have been the subject for the past three years of a TV series on TLC (The Learning [?] Channel) called 19 Kids and Counting (17 Kids and Counting the first season, and 18 Kids and Counting last season). The parent Duggars — Jim Bob and Michelle — are devout Christians, who married in 1984, lived the first four years of their marriage on birth control, but then, because of what they took to be a birth control problem with a still-birth, decided to let their god sort things out (“We believe that each child is a special gift from God and we are thankful to Him for each one,” they write on their website), and went on to produce children the past 20 years the way other people produce tomatoes. Michelle Duggar (43) has spent almost half of her life pregnant. (Jim Bob only has to perform his stud function about once a year; it’s not clear what he does the rest of the time, though apparently he spends a lot of time at home on the TV show.) They have nine girls and ten boys, all with names beginning with the letter J (Joshua, Jana, John, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Joshua, Joy . . . and so on). They homeschool all of the kids and allow very little time to TV or the Internet. They use a buddy system to raise the kids, an older sibling assigned to care for a younger one. They live in Tontitown, Arkansas. And by all appearances on the TV show, everyone gets along fine, is doing well, there are no conflicts, no voices are raised, no butts are whacked.

This whole thing is obviously odd (why else would it be a reality TV show?). And if Michelle and Jim Bob want to let their family be determined by their superstition/god, so be it (though one has to wonder if that original motivation hasn’t been supplanted by the gods of their TV show, their website, their Facebook page, and their book). But why does the culture have to celebrate this gross irresponsibility? Why does The Today Show and I don’t know how many other TV “news” outlets and publications have to promote as positive what should be condemned as thoughtless self-aggrandizement and social recklessness?