Ghost Hunters Count Down

Ghost Hunters's mid-season premiere is on this Wednesday night. And, I am ready to watch Jason and Grant tackle Alcatraz with their techno-geek speak. A couple of times over the last few months, I have resorted to watching Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel to get my paranormal fix. I was unnerved.

Clearly knock offs of the successful Ghost Hunter franchise, Ghost Adventures and those others (Ghost Lab) reflect a dark trend in our society.

Everyone knows the signs.

A blind commitment
A esoteric and arcane knowledge
A cultish adherence to an unwritten but absolute set of rules
A willingness to explain, expound

These function as filters (better than any ever created by Microsoft). They enable normal people--the high school cheerleader, the two golfers knocking back drinks at the club, or wives discussing Oprah over lattes—to navigate around geeks without having to notice them, talk to them, stop at Starbucks with them.

The geekiness of Ghost Hunter’s Grant and Jason is indisputable. If you have any doubts, spend five minutes surfing their webpages (both the SyFY and the TAPS sites), read a handful of their Twitters, or lurk in their chatroom. It’s all there. The internet does not lie—at least in this way.

True, an authentic geek often has the loyal, socially adept friend. (To fully understand the implications of this relationship, watch Lucas or less painfully reflect on Han’s role in Star Wars. All geeks are ultimately and finally Jedi knights in disguise.) In point of fact, Jason and Grant have Josh Gates from Destination Truth.

For the most part, though, society has ignored the geek and for good reason.

The geeky obsession (if that is not too strong or vulgar) is a response to a higher calling. And this response requires the authentic, true geek to willingly sacrifice any pretense of convention or conformity. In short, social standing is jettisoned.

And therein lies the ugly, dysfunctionality of Ghost Lab and its kind. These guys are not geeks. They are cool hipsters, muscle bound studs, black clad tough guys who spent their adolescence tormenting the kid who knew too much about Spiderman or WoW. Posers. Imposters. Insidious infiltrators. Indeed, I am tempted to label them the Sith of prime time cable programming—but not being a part of the geek inner sanctum (not knowing the name of the creature that almost disembowels Luke on that ice planet) I hesitate.

Uncomfortable with the outlier, our society has taken notice of the geek and has begun the process of assimilation. (Yes, that is a mixed metaphor. And the fact that you caught it and snarked on it marks you as one of them.)

Bayard Sartoris