Social Econ Blog

During my freshman year of college, a white supremacist group wanted to build some sort of white-supremacist training camp in the rural parts of my home county. When the community heard about this, there was an uproar against the development -- including large protests. The white supremacists decided they didn't like the attention and decided to try their luck elsewhere. The successful protests received attention from national news outlets. One headline (I believe in USA Today) read "Hate Free Town" (one of my high school friends had this article displayed prominently on his dorm room door at Stanford, although I could never figure out if he posted it out of pride or because he thought it ironic having been subject to a fair amount of racism as one of the handful of minorities in the area).

After Friday night's broadcast of FOX's reality program "Trading Spouses", Grants Pass is going to have to work on its "hate free" reputation. Josephine County resident Julie Chase (from the clips on the show, I think it is pretty clear that she doesn't actually live in GP, but out in the unincorporated parts of the county) severely embarrassed herself on national TV (and unfortunately damaged my hometown's reputation in the process). A commenter at the Trading Spouses forum at Television Without Pity nicely summarizes her performance stating, "Y'know, every single time I think 'ugh, s/he is the single nastiest, most obnoxious, most horrid person I've ever seen on reality TV', someone comes along and proves that there's someone worse. Hate!Mom [Mrs. Chase] is now on the top of my list."

So what did she do to earn such scorn? Here's a small taste (and not even close to the worst):



For a more detailed account, here's a full recap from PhoneGrrrl. For those who don't click through, here's a quick overview of some of the lowlights:

On the next day of the swap, Pepper has allowed the cleaning lady to come, as per usual. The vacuuming wakes Julie up and she’s not happy. She’s even less happy when she finds out that the cleaning lady is *gasp* Hispanic! She says she cannot be physically close to “them” because of her issues with illegals. She tells Pepper that she hates illegal immigrants because they are terrible people who come to American and do terrible things. She simply cannot allow for the possibility that the illegal immigrants could be good people. She also seems not able to allow for legal immigration either. Pepper is astounded that Julie is so intolerant.

Pepper should not have set the bar so low for Julie’s prejudice. Later in the day, while preparing dinner, Pepper tries to steer the conversation in what she could only assume was neutral territory—she was expressing compassion at the conjoined twins who were in the news. Julie, who by now we all know is about as emotional as a deflated tire, doesn’t feel compassion or empathy toward them because she isn’t the one making fun of them, so why should she care. Somehow or another the conversation gets to the point where Julie said that she had the Down’s Syndrome test on her girls when she was pregnant and would have aborted them had they turned up with that genetic marker. This is a sensitive subject for Pepper because she has a developmentally disabled sister. Pepper says that having a birth defect is no reason why the person can’t be a good person and worthy of love. Julie then likes being gay to having a birth defect, and that really sets Pepper off, and she leaves the room to try to regain some composure. Julie comments that Pepper just needs to toughen up, and there’s nothing but the truth coming from her.

Sad because you missed this nightmare? Don't worry. This was only part 1. Part 2 will be broadcast this Friday at 9PM.

Update -- Julie was pretty awful on part 2, although the ep was a bit anti-climactic. However, at one point Julie asks herself, "Am I a monster?" There is a simple answer to this. Yes. Yes, you are.

Update 2 -- Congratulations to Julie! You were so inflammatory and over the top that you earned ridicule on both VH1's Best Week Ever and E!'s The Soup.

Update 3 -- You can read how GP locals are responding to this embarassment here.