They all conform to The Look: they’re young, gorgeous, healthy, pumped, scantily-dressed. Nobody with any physical defect whatsoever. Any blemish or bulge (or lack thereof) has been dyed, planed, sanded, liposuctioned, tucked, or implanted with silicon. Any excessively ethnic feature has been chopped, channeled, or contoured to conform to the Norm—the consumer-focus-group-tested ideal of most desirable human. Some of their professions, past and present, include: Laker cheerleader, veejay, Playboy Bunny (now a doctor), tribute-band bass player, video dancer, and Miss Georgia. Even those that have real jobs, like estate agent, are dedicated supplicants at the altar of the cosmetic self.

Perfect physical specimens. And what does that remind you of? No, no, no, I don’t mean models in cigarette ads or the hard-body dudes and dudettes in Details magazine. I mean specimens of the race. It’s a world built on advertising prototypes of physical perfectibility. And we all know where that concept led. Here, they throw in a few black and Latino hunks because we’re a little more liberal than the social engineers of the Third Reich, and, hey, don’t forget we’re chasing those demographics.

If you don’t resemble any of these people, you don’t exist. You shouldn’t exist. If you’re not a model of physical perfection, they send you to that other island. Actually, that other island (aka reality itself) exists just a few miles off shore. It’s called Belize, a desperately poor Central American country you don’t hear too much about because they haven’t figured out that to get the attention of the United States you have to have a junta once in a while—or, at the very least, a military dictatorship that we can do business with.

None of the inhabitants of Belize City (being, for the most part, black, poor, malnourished and enthusiastic consumers of polyester) would qualify for Temptation Island, except as waiters and trash-haulers.

Actually there’s quite a sizeable American population in Belize—almost all are on the lam. It’s a favorite vacationing resort for the U.S. criminal class because they speak English there, Belize being a former UK colony called British Honduras. They had to change their name because their neighbors in Honduras might get the wrong idea and annex them. It’s something of a thieves’ carnival down there. Pimps, dealers, second-story men, safe-crackers, hijackers, hit men and scene stealers, they’re all there. You know that brother-in-law who embezzled all the money from your investment fund? I saw him in a bar on Victoria Street, he was trying to sell me a used administration.

If you hang around Belize City long enough you’ll come across almost any low-life, underworld character from a Bob Dylan lyric circa 1965 you’d ever want to meet. It’s not that it’s all that dangerous a place. As Bob used to say, "to live outside the law, you must be honest." There are cops down there after a fashion—but no cop cars. So, if something happens to you and you want to call the police, you’ve got to pick them up in your car and take them to the crime scene yourself. My friend Ray Kelly tried to start a little farm down there. He got so pissed off from people stealing stuff that he began sleeping with a shotgun. Then one night someone crept in the house and stole it from under his pillow (he decided to leave after that).

Belize is beautiful, lush, and quaint. What is this compulsion, begun by Survivor, the granddaddy of these shows, to redo paradise in tiki-bar tacky? Where did they get the set decorator for this show—from Duck Tales? And that tropical-breeze score is straight out of a Don Ho TV special offer. Is it any coincidence that Temptation Island dovetails so seamlessly with the Sandals vacation package commercials that sponsor it?

I read somewhere that these shows are bad for us because they aggravate an already serious problem in our society—our inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But when exactly in history were people able to distinguish between fact and invention? Was it during the Middle Ages when people thought goats and cats were agents of the Devil? In Ancient Greece when the philosophical Athenians believed that gods mated with swans? During the Enlightenment when they were still burning witches at the stake? No, we’re deluded as a species—and in many ways that is a Good Thing. After all, without illusions there would be no art. The problem here is the quality of the fantasy. Gilligan’s Island was as plastic as a McDonald’s spoon but at least it had some characters aboard. Here we have only the slick, shallow surface of the narcissistic, consumer-duped dot.com generation.

I’ve also heard that this show callously promotes broken hearts and broken lives for the purposes of mere entertainment. Dear sir, these are not real people in the sense that you think; they are mediated morons, the genus cosmeticus, a group of people so addled by the media, cult of celebrity, and glossy magazines that reality to them is their own fabricated reflections.

Seriously folks, we should at least stop calling these things "reality shows." If Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Heraclitus couldn’t figure out what reality was, do you really think we’re going to find out on a one-hour piece of fluff? And if this is a reality show, where are the existentialists?