Did any of you watch Find My Family last night? It’s the talk of the AdoptaSphere. “Unfortunately,” I didn’t. The CRAZY HOUSEGUEST commandeered my TV to download off his Play Station (or whatever he does) a lecture by some crackpot talking about lizard people who colonized earth a million years ago, circle the earth eternally to”protect” their half-blood progeny (us), and promise to unplug the Federal Reserve if things get too dicey. They also oppose the European Union and Barrack Obama. (I am NOT kidding)
It’s always folly to talk about a TV show you haven’t seen, but since this is my blog I’ll do it anyway. So far, the reaction in AdoptionLaLaLand to Find My Family, except for Lorraine Dusky who liked it, has been a lot of “triggering” and weeping over reunion, even if adoptaviewers claim they hate the show. Beat me. It feels so good.
I figure Find My Family must be pretty bourgeois since do-gooders aren’t complaining as they did over Who’s Your Daddy, which, with its big boobed adoptee/soft porn actress on the make, truly was fun. (NOTE to the National Council for Adoption and The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute: Nobody cares what you think. Who’s Your Daddy did not destroy adoption as you moaned. Adoption is doing a quite nice job of destroying itself without TV’s help.)
I’ve read a couple of open boards on the program. (ABC is probably the most civil) There’s the usual spate of ungrateful-you-could-have-been-aborted lectures and, don’t-worry-be-happy chripers on the other side. Adopters complain that their leg of the “triad” (there we go again with that naughty word!) was kicked out from under them in the reunion, aka after all we did for you. Well….Will Robinson… for once something about adoption is about the two who got the shit end of the stick…not you. (The reviewer on that site, btw, really really hates the show, but not for the reasons we could hate it for.)
Naturally, the elephant…er gorilla… in the room is sealed records. The ever witty, astute, and acid-fingered Ron Morgan (right at Studio City “Honk if you’re my Daddy” action) posted on FauxClaud D’Arcy’s FB page:
It’s the 800 lb gorilla in the green room…shows like this thrive on mystifying the process of identity theft and positioning sentimentality in it’s place. “somehow this person NEVER KNEW their family of origin but tonight they will be REUNITED! And now a word from Preparation H….”
Of course, reunion shows wouldn’t be so titillating to the lego public if bastards could just walk down to their local vital stats or courthouse and pick up their birth certificates at leisure like everybody else.
Another thing bothers me. Who’s doing the searches? Reportedly no one was acknowledged on the show. TV searches are outsourced to professionals. I know someone who did one. Since Troy Dunn’s got his own gig now, who’s there to pick up the slack? Rumor has it: search angels. Now, I am aware of some excellent search angels, but they are few and far between. Do we need to go there? And why would anyone work for ABC for free?
I’ve always thought that reunion shows were soft propaganda (and I admit it…my guilty pleasure, like Lawrence Welk.) Everyone is so benign and teary and happy, unlike the way the government portrays us. Nobody bitchslaps her mother. Even the doofiest adoptee gets big hugs from his mom and sisters. The occasional aw-shucks dad is as dangerous as Ozzie Nelson. It all seems natural and harmless to KNOW WHERE YOU CAME FROM, even if the government tags you a Bader Meinhoff lamster or Charlie Manson is your dad. For legos it’s genealogy. For bastards it’s homewrecking.
There’s no movement to ban reunion shows from TV. The shows feel good. They’re warm-hearted, especially during the there’s no-place-like-home-for-the-holidays platitudinal season. Too bad, then, that all of those Barcoloungers who find reunion shows so heart-warming, homey, and lovely-dovey, like a warm cup of hot buttered rum, don’t put their money or their body where their mouth is and demand that lawmakers unseal obcs in their own states.
Unfortunately, we live a country where the simulacrum that plays on the screen is “real,” bereft of archaic laws, high muckety-murky legislators, and snake-oiled adoption industrialists and their special interest self-perpetuating smirkers and thugs on both side of the aisle. So why mess up an entertaining reality show with reality? And politics? Let the monkeys dance!
Will Find My Family, as some hope, become a forum to expose the sealed records system? It’s highly doubtful. Find My Family, full of melo and tears, won’t shit in its own box.
November 25,2009 1-:55 AM, Addenda: Triona Guidry (adoptee73) has a good blog today on the show: Adoption, search, reunion, Is reality TV good for our rights, or adoption exploitation? She writes:
What we need are some shows that follow the demonstrations for our rights, the late nights writing letters to legislators and the media, the indignity of trying to say your piece while those same legislators are walking out on your testimony.
I cannot remember any national show covering adoptee civil rights since MSNBC’s April 2, 1997 The Site: “Parent Search” segment with Soledad O’Brien. Producers worked closely with Bastard Nation, we were heavily featured. The end product was very good. The link is no longer available from the network. 12 years and nothing else?
And here I thought the Pres was one of the Reptilian Humanoids, but now I learn they’re against him. So does that mean the fringe right likes the lizards now?
I wonder if the reason why adoptees can’t have their OBCs is because they are in fact Reptilian Humanoids who were born on another planet where they don’t have BCs. I bet that’s it.
Actually, the lizard talk comes from more of a leftest prospective.
I think you may be on to something about our OBCs. Many years ago, when the Columbus Citizen-Journal was still publishing, a letter writer informed us that he knew many women who had breed with lizards and their children roamed the earth.
I think I went out with somm of them.
I didn’t see the show either. I’ve always been a sucker for those shows. Funny how I always thought of myself as a mutant in this society. Never realizing til now that it was the government that originally put that thought in my head.
Like you, I wasn’t able to watch the show and I am glad I didn’t. I triggered the beejeezus out of my oldest daughter. I absolutely LOVE the fact that it is about the ones who “got the shitty end of the stick!” Us sluts and bastards always get kicked to the curb. It is our time now and we will prevail and the earth will be ours!! Muwahahahahaha!!
Seriously, I think my oldest son’s penis pappy was a lizard. (no disrespect to natural fathers..he was the one who raped me)
But Lizards are cute! Like the Geiko Gecko. And Jim Morrison was the Lizard King…..
I’ve said it before, but Marley, you don’t have to run a private psycho ward in your house, and certainly not let the mental patient take over your TV! Throw him out. Before he get a weapon and decides you are the enemy the voices in his head warned him about!
Didn’t see the show, don’t intend to, but it sounds cheesy and harmless.
I did watch Find My Family and the word “fake” kept coming to my mind.
Someone who I know of that I still think works for Troy Dunn and company told me “search angels” are finding the people. I am leary that although Troy has his own show now that some of his employees are involved with Find My Family. As you pointed out in your blog – would search angels locate people for free for ABC? I highly doubt it. We who have been around a while know how deceitful Troy is and the different names he has used for his online reunion registries. So why not try search angels. After all we have others calling themselves that when I highly doubt that they are doing it for free. For one thing databases cost money.
I will watch Find My Family again but if the next show is very simiar to the first, that will be the end of it for me. I have better things to do with my time.
It makes you wonder how much the media *could* be involved in stalling unsealing of records. Honestly, they’d lose their ability to bring to the public those “happy-feeling-inside” stories about reunion and long-lost siblings finding one another, and these shows that glorify the reunion and make it seem so simple (they do the same to us offspring……most people now assume that EVERYONE finds a sibling on the DSR and that everyone has a donor number thanks to the media propagations of WK for the DSR!!!!)
Everything in the media is about the happy-endings. I was contacted last year by the Morning Show with Mike and Juliet (Fox) wanting me to come on the show later that week. Well, as I found out quickly enough, they [for some reason only god knows……likely stupidity and lack of actually READING my blog] thought that I had FOUND my biological father!!! They wanted a reunion or something heart-warming along that sort and when I said I hadn’t found him they abruptly said they no longer wanted me on the show.
The networks would lose their all-time favorite warm fuzzy clip. Of course they don’t want OBCs to be unsealed or anonymity of donors banned. Then there would be no glory in finding one another — they couldn’t use the trademark key-in “against all odds” and make it seem so damn easy to find family and that everyone wants that reunion.
Ya, I’m sending a letter to the “Find My Family” producers about the fact that they are completely ignoring a civil rights issue.
However, this show would probably not have such stories if not for closed records. Again, money is being made with the suffering of adoptees.
You’re right. They’ll keep the elephant in the room quiet, ’cause “they wont sh*t in their own box”.
Hey – it was just the first show so it had to be all yay-rah! even tho the adopters wanted to show more of the “real” side of adoption, something about wiping their adoptlings’ butts and stuff and how all the burf-parents were crack addicts.
Didn’t see it either – was having dinner with my first mom and family.
Thanks for the link. This feels to me like yet another way to make money off mothers and adoptees, similar to the way agencies now offer post-adoption “services” that charge for access to the very same records that they themselves sealed! Lindsay, to answer your question, I think the media could very well get involved in adoption reform and could make a difference… but it would have to be bona fide journalism, not sensationalism. The sensationalists only want the happy feel-good reunions, or the “my father is Charles Manson” type stories, the more salacious the better. It remains to be seen if Find My Family will delve into the civil rights aspects. I for one don’t plan to watch… as Robin said, too triggering.
Ya know, back in the day when reunions were common fodder for talk shows–this is the mid-eighties–every show brought a lot of new people into the movement, or simply people who wanted to …er, find their families. So while I agree it’s TV primed to be emotional and trigger a lot of tears…so what? Until every single birth record of every single adopted person in the world is open, the more this is on television, the better. A show like this can do more to highlight the injustice of sealed records than all the letters I can write to legislators. And that is why, as you noted in the blog, I support this show, as well as The Locator. Life is messy and teary and sorrowful and both shows illustrate that.
Beats the triggering Home for the Holiday. Where everybody finds homes and they aren’t newborns go figure….
I watched the show and I was moved by the enormity of the LOSS..the first mom, first dad, bio sisters and bio brother. It really touched me that the first parents were only 15 and 16 when they had to give their child away …but didn’t want to….FOREVER. That was huge to me. Some comments on the Rainbow article mentioned this show “wouldn’t do anything good for adoption”…. it made adoption appear second best. I can live with that! I think it will positively impact open records, reunions, LESS adoption, and more social programs to keep families together.
Someone named “Bev” commented she …”will probably not watch the show again because of the lack of feeling for the adoptive parents.” Adopters have society’s support and an entire month of every year dedicated to their capitalizing on someone’s LOSS and misfortune. It’s time to highlight the other aspects.