'19 Kids and Counting' Gets Stranger, Sadder
The fifth season of TLC's beguiling, baffling, and oftentimes be-rage-ifying (just go with it) Quiverfull family series 19 Kids and Counting premiered last night, and while it was mostly a typical Duggars episode, with eerily wholesome family activities and a dash of stomach-turning religiosity, there was a new grimness to the series that didn't sit right.
The bulk of the episode was, again, pretty normal. There was a cutesy segment of the family planting fruit trees on their property, which was part activity for the kids and part attempt to create a food source for twenty people. The clan traveled to some sort of corn maze/petting zoo, where the little ones scrambled around and the bigger ones had fun in their own slightly less enthusiastic way. This is, at least on film, a defiantly wholesome family; these kids aren't constantly moaning about shopping malls and video games, cellphones and parties. Maybe that stuff factors in off-air, but in TLC's carefully edited version of the Duggars' world, all children, ages 2 to 18, are happy to be gamboling about together in a cornfield. That's fine! It's a little weird, of course, but why would anyone watch TLC if they didn't want something a little weird? (Even the network's current best show, Four Weddings, is a little weird.)
And then of course there was the infusion of religion that probably earns the series a fair number of looky-loos (ahem). Michelle Duggar, the broodmare who gave birth to this baseball team, was invited to speak to a ladies group at a nearby church, and though what we saw of the speech was mostly a series of platitudes about family and children and all that, there was a single shot that said much more -- the camera panned over a handout that Michelle brought to the event, and the content was pretty unsettling. TLC maybe included this shot for people like us, who of course paused it and advanced the frames to read as much of it as we could, and, whooo boy, was it unpleasant. It was all about how to make your husband happy in a marriage, which is of paramount importance to patriarch-dominated Quiverfull families. There were things about how wives shouldn't refuse their husbands' sexual advances, about how self-reliance is what kills marriages, about not stepping out of bounds in terms of what your responsibilities are as a wife (do too much and you emasculate him, you see). It was all reeeeally gross stuff that you never really hear the Duggars talking about on the show, but is absolutely the unspoken (on camera, at least) foundation of their family. (As evidenced by the fact that older boys are encouraged to pursue education and careers while their sisters remain indentured babysitters.) So that's why the rage-junkies watch this horrorshow, to get that electric adrenalin rush of anger at what a strange and backwards belief system these seemingly cheery and wholesome creatures actually operate under.
So, yes, it was a typical Duggar outing last night, until the last segment, which involved wife Michelle and husband Jim Bob going to the doctor to hear the heartbeat of their upcoming 20th child. In the scene, the doctor couldn't find the heartbeat on the Doppler monitor, so there was a scary bit of tension, but then she found the baby on the sonogram and it was a happy moment of relief. Until, of course, one remembered that Michelle eventually lost the baby, a girl they named Jubilee Shalom. Yeesh. That seems awfully grim for this typically only glancingly serious show. Of course it's important to show the effects of giving birth to 19 children, to confront the frustrating and avoidable risks of practicing this kind of "procreate first, ask questions never" family management technique. So that makes it worthwhile. And I'm sure for the Duggars it's important to show the courage and conviction of their faith in the face of loss. But the knowing that it's going to happen, the bleak procedural inevitability of it, is akin to the death march of the recent Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season, in which the specter of a future suicide loomed over the proceedings. It seems like probably the worst way to handle this kind of thing.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/02/19-kids-and-counting-gets-stranger-sadder/48733/
Too weird for me ... 
= new reply since forum marked as read
strangest thing ever. I'll have to post pics one of these days- it's like a book written by near illiterates who had no idea what a credible book would look like. Seriously, it's a leatherette-bound, gilt-paged consumable textbook. 
Oh, and here's a sample of the Gothard homeschooling program they use for the kids. It takes a minute to load because it's a PDF, but it's worth it for the sheer lunacy of it. http://ati.iblp.org/ati/about/curriculum/wisdombooklets/documents/wb4sample.pdf?show=true
at the very least one or two rebels in the bunch.
I can't WAIT to see JimBob's shellacked hair stand on end. 
a couple of years ago. the ignorance got to be too much for me. i do like to read the snark tho
his wife seems to be the one who wants to keep up with Ma & Pa Duggar and wants to work on having 20. 
I especially like the earlier post promoting forced sterilization of her husband. When I defended her RIGHT TO CHOOSE when she originally announced her 20th pregnancy, the same thing happened. Funny how that pro-choice bar seems to move when it's someone the neo-liberals disapprove of. 
Time for her husband to trade her in for newer model who can continue on giving him kids.
