Month: March 2004

Inside the studio of East Village Radio on the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, the hip hop activists cue up their mental scripts while awkwardly climbing past each other for their turn at the mic. The low-power underground FM station broadcasts from a Manhattan storefront the size of walk-in closet. As is often the case when hip hop and politics are brought under the same roof, things are cramped, disorganized and getting hot.

“We’re back,” says DJ Ariel, the mellow-voiced hostess of the Soulution Sunday Brunch. “The subject of today’s show is the hip hop generation and the youth vote—or more specifically, the lack of the youth vote.”

It’s a question that has loomed large among political strategists, youth activists and educators for decades, and one that seems to take on a more desperate tone every four years during the presidential election: How do we get young people to the polls? Sitting to DJ Ariel’s right is George Martinez, Blackout Arts Collective co-founder, and Martha Diaz, president of the National Hip Hop Association (NH2A). Both of them are right in their element. If the subject is voter apathy, they say, it’s time to teach through hip hop.

“Today’s youth,” says Martinez, “you can’t talk to them unless you’re talking about hip hop." A professor of political science at Pace University, the 29-year-old was born in El Barrio and laid down his musical and political roots in the Bronx under the B-boy tag “Rithm.”

Diaz agrees. The former high school teacher started NH2A as a vehicle for education reform: “We need different interpretations and different insight into what’s going on. We need to get young people connected and involved in the political process.”

Hip hop’s recent domination of the Grammy Awards is an indisputable indicator that the underground music scene has emerged as a cultural and economic powerhouse. But as Martinez points out, hip hop’s political relevance—at least in terms of elections—is still up for grabs. And now, with the 2004 elections coming on fast, this has led several hip hop organizations to declare a political call to arms among the hip hop generation.

This might be easier said than done. The NH2A, the Hip Hop Summit Action Network, Rock the Vote and others are all mobilizing to carve out a slightly different, sometimes conflicting, vision of hip hop’s political identity. What is at stake is not only which white guy is sitting in the Oval Office, but whose voice is behind the microphone of hip hop America.

Where my young voters at?

As presidential candidates crisscross the country to mine the electorate for any new or swayable voters, young voters (18 to 24 or 30) remain as elusive as a bad dancer who’s avoiding the prom. According to Political.com, this is especially true among minorities and disenfranchised youth in urban and rural areas, who have lower voter turnout rates than white suburban youth.

Multiply this generalization by the fact that young voters as a whole traditionally have the lowest turnout rate of any age group. Naina Khanna of the League of Young Voters says that only 32 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the 2000 presidential election. “And that’s 10 percent lower than the number that voted in the 1992 election,” she says. This is a far cry from the politically tumultuous days of the 1960s and ’70s, when voters in that age bracket headed to the polls at a rate of more than 50 percent.

The reason for the drop? The explanation most young people give is that voting is simply not important in their daily life, and they don’t see their concerns or their beliefs reflected in the political debate. In regards to the current election, DJ Ariel relays her listener’s frustration. “We have all these different characters up there telling us, ‘Vote for me, vote for me,’ and they all sound the sameThey don’t necessarily speak to young people.”

But voter apathy and low turnout among young people is a self-creating phenomenon. Kids don’t vote, in part, because they don’t feel politicians are addressing their concerns, and politicians aren’t addressing their concerns because young people don’t vote. Senior citizens, meanwhile, typically vote at a rate double that of 18- to 24-year-olds and thus have enormous influence over the agendas politicians push for. Funds for higher education can get pummeled, but lay a finger on grandma’s pocket book, sonny, and you can kiss your political career goodbye.

Developing a political agenda

Yet while most young’uns turn to the soothing balm of indifference, others are drawn toward alternative means of expressing their frustration, which is where hip hop steps up to bat. Ruth Henry, a middle-school teacher from inner-city Boston, sees hip hop as a communication tool that has filled the civic gaps for many young people. “Our hip hop artists and our poets are becoming like our historians,” she says, “our reporters and our prophets. So the power [of hip hop] is that it is able to spread information on a local level, a national level and a global level.”

Martinez knows first-hand how hip hop can spread information and influence politics. In 2002, he won a New York City Council seat in a heated race by campaigning under a progressive, street-wise platform of community empowerment. This soon morphed into a position under the New York State Attorney General, and Martinez is now able to boast about being the first rapper ever elected to political office.

But he’s not the only hip hop politician out there. In 2001, Kwame Kilpatrick was elected mayor of Detroit. The self-proclaimed “Mayor of Hip Hop” started his political career in the Michigan House of Representatives in 1996. At age 31, he became the youngest mayor of a major city. Though the Detroit News has criticized Kilpatrick’s “pricey gangster threads” and Escalade motorcades, it also called him, “the political voice of urban youth [and] the picture of what the next generation of black leaders will look like.”

Though Kilpatrick comes from within the Democratic establishment—his mother is a Michigan congresswoman and his father is a county executive—most hip hoppers working within the political system originated from within the activist community. Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, for instance, brought on Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, a 32-year-old minister from St. Louis, as the “ambassador to the hip hop community.” Sekou organized hip hop house parties and concerts to get the vote of 18- to 24-year-olds who might have been attracted to Kucinich’s brand of progressivism. The former MC is also an activist who embraced hip hop in his work with troubled teens. “It became a pedagogical tool for me when I was doing anti-gang work and violence prevention in the St. Louis public schools,” he says.

But Sekou acknowledges that hip hop faces many challenges before it can produce a replicable strategy to influence the political system on both local and national levels. “There’s some fledgling models [but] we don’t know how sustaining it can be,” Sekou says. “And we don’t have adequate resources and even with those resources we run up against the gate-keepers within the record industry or the older activists who really don’t understand the value of this demographic. They have to be willing to sit there and give up power and resources. And they say to me, ‘Well, do these people vote?’ And my question back to them is, ‘Have we given people something to vote for?’“

Sekou also acknowledges that hip hop fans need to take responsibility and come up with a political agenda. “What are our demands? Who’s our constituency?” he asks.

These are the very questions at the heart of the National Hip Hop Political Convention to take place June 16-19 in New Jersey. It bills itself as a “gathering of the hip hop generation to vote on, adopt and endorse a political agenda.” Working with Diaz’s NH2A and other activist groups, organizer Baya Wilson sees the convention’s focus as different from other hip hop political initiatives that only deal with candidate profiles or voter registration. By utilizing delegates from around the country, the convention seeks to establish a coherent constituency. “We can go on and endorse and develop a political unity,” Wilson has said, “so that when these politicians come to the table we can say this is who we are and this is what we want.”

Empowering the hip hop community and young people with the political weight of a constituency is also the drive behind William Upski Wimsatt’s new brainchild, The League of Independent Voters. Author of the seminal hip hop books Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons, Wimsatt hopes to utilize the Internet—in the vein of Moveon.org and Meetup.com—to not only get young people to vote, but to also organize to swing specific states in the favor of youth-minded candidates. Naina Khanna of the League says that young people need to organize, put together their platforms and endorse certain candidates.

These may be revolutionary ideas for the youth and hip hop community, but it’s nothing new within American politics. Like-minded groups of people have long banded together in voter blocks in order to hold greater clout. Think of the Christian Right, labor unions or the NAACP—all have very clear agendas and messages, which they project into the political debate to get what they want. Within hip hop, however, there is a divide not across political boundaries (it’s doubtful any Hip Hoppers For Bush chapters will be starting up anytime soon), but between the commercial end of hip hop and those who have an aesthetic vision of what hip hop can and should be. While it’s not the kind of conflict that destroys movements, this divergence may become more distinct and difficult to overcome as the elections approach.

Ever since the days of the politically charged lyrics of Public Enemy and KRS-One, hip hop has busted beats through the lens of social justice issues like racism, poverty, education and police brutality. Though much of what passes for mainstream hip hop today can be dropped into the category of Top 40 crap, one can still find socially conscious lyrics by acts like the Roots, Q-Tip and Mos Def positioned on the charts between the flashy nihilism of bling-blingers like Jay-Z and Puff Daddy.

Today, many draw a line between industry-driven mainstream rap and the world of underground hip hop. Cedric Muhammed, who pilots webzine blackelectorate.com, pointed out in a recent interview with hip hop radio guru Davey D, that the split between differing hip hop factions won’t make it easy to unite the scene under one political umbrella: “We have activists that don’t like the academic intellectuals who don’t like the entrepreneurs who don’t like some of the artists who are struggling to develop a political consciousness.”

MasterS in da house

And then there’s Russell Simmons. The legendary founder of Def Jam Records, Simmons is credited with bringing hip hop culture into the consciousness of mainstream America. He is Chairman of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network, which draws thousands from the hip hop diaspora to its yearly conventions for concerts, panels and workshops. The 46-year-old recently launched the more ambitious “One Mind, One Vote” campaign that hopes to register 2 million voters in the next six to nine months and 20 million in the next five years. To do this, Simmons plans to put on 30 to 40 Hip Hop Summits before the November presidential elections (he held the first one in Houston on Super Bowl weekend).

But for the likes of Martinez and other hip hop activists, in the long run Simmons’ good intentions often do more harm than good. It has been noted by many that Simmons’ huge success is due in part to the fact that he markets hip hop like a brand. His political methodology is best viewed as a business model, they say, selling his Phat Farm clothing and his new Def-Con 3 energy drink while the “compassionate capitalist” slangs his political message. Because of this he has been credited—and reviled—more than anyone for intertwining hip hop and commercialism.

“We recognize bullshit,” says Martinez. He is critical of the “rap industry elite,” who encourage young people to Rock the Vote but don’t advocate strong political stances and perhaps haven’t even voted themselves. An example he gives is Jay-Z, who registered to vote once in 1988 but hasn’t voted since. “It’s what we call ‘hip hopcricy,’” Martinez says.

Choose Your Own Decisions?

Rev. Al Sharpton, who disappointingly wasn’t granted Simmons’ endorsement for president, clearly realizes his position within hip hop. In his book, Al on America, he cuts right to the heart of the culture’s current dilemma, “[T]he question for Russell and others of the hip hop generation is not who they’re going to endorse for political office,” Sharpton says, “but what they’re going to endorse.”

Or, as the Weekly Standard once said of Rock the Vote, “Practicing politics without content is like dancing without music. It can be done, but there’s not much joy in it.”

Since 1992, Rock the Vote has been one of the most successful young voter registration organizations, mostly because of its high visibility as a frequent collaborator with MTV. In order to make young people care about politics, Rock the Vote defers to a stable of famous people including Coolio, John Leguizamo and Snoop Dogg as “artists who rock the vote.” Its president, Jehmu Green, who once headed women’s outreach for the Democratic National Committee, has a mission similar to that of other organizations. “Looking at how close this election is going to be, young people really have the opportunity to be the swing vote,” Green told Free Speech TV. And since Rock the Vote is the best established and most well known of the youth voter campaigns, it has a high likelihood of getting the most people to sign on.

But like many of the nonprofits working for voter registration, Rock the Vote has to conduct itself under the guise of a nonpartisan organization. This can become problematic, say many activists. Simply registering young voters who may already be politically indifferent and then telling them to “choose” won’t ensure that they’ll be engaged, responsible voters.

Herding cats

Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles the hip hop community must overcome as it wades into the tumultuous tides of electoral politics is its own anti-establishment identity, which values independence and abhors categorization. When Free Speech TV recently asked Ralph Nader the difficulties of forming an independent party, he said, “Independent voters are notoriously independent. They don’t like to organize themselves. It’s like herding cats.”

For the world of hip hop it’s not much different. In a third-storey flat overlooking Brooklyn, New York, Chad Bozeman, a 27-year-old MC and writer shared his qualms about formulating hip hop like a political party. Hip hop for him is about constant change; it’s about breaking expectations and denying homogeneity. “You take a little bit of jazz, a little bit of reggae, some funk beats, and constantly mix it all up,” he says. For many hip hop kids like Bozeman, there is an inherent wariness in establishing a set of rules and beliefs for people to abide by. But if hip hop activists and politicians can win over people like Bozeman, as well as come together to create a unified agenda, hip hop can really become a vehicle for political change.

With a network of blogs, websites and hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers organizing street-level concerts and events, hip hop has huge potential to educate and mobilize young people. But as it moves into the more ordered structure that is required for registering voters, creating platforms and endorsing candidates, the hip hop movement is facing new challenges and has found itself in a conflicted state.

Hip hop will get out the vote, that is assured. To what degree, however, is not yet clear. One thing is certain: We’ll know that the voices talking into the mic will be speaking some worthwhile shit for once.

Jared Jacang Maher is a Contributing Editor for Adbusters Magazine.

Q: Dear Ace, what is going on south of the airport on Earlysville Road? More runways? And there’s a lovely tree with a fence around it, so whatever is happening, I assume the tree stays. Thanks for any info.—Anne Arbor

A: While business at the Charlottesville- Albemarle Airport has certainly taken off since it was first built in 1955, Anne, the answer to your question is: No, the airport folks are not adding runways at this time. They’re just trying to keep The Man off their backs.

Airport Executive Director Bryan Elliott explains that the project in question is to bring the airport up to code with Federal Aviation Administration guidelines requiring safety areas off the ends of runways. The requirements, revised about 15 years ago, Elliott says, call for an additional 1,000 feet of space to be cleared at the ends of landing strips, 500 feet in width. It’s all just in case something goes wrong with an aircraft overshooting its target, to make sure it can’t cause any real damage to people or property.

Trouble is, right now State Route 606 winds through the space in question. That’s what they’re trying to fix. The project will relocate the intersection of 606 and State Route 743 about 825 feet to the south of the required area, Elliot says. Once that’s completed—sometime around summer 2005, Elliott figures—additional sections of 743 will get a similar treatment.

As to the second part of your question, give yourself some credit for your eagle eyes—there is indeed a tree fenced off in the workzone that Elliott says has been deigned off-limits to construction guys and their machinery. In a turn sure to make nature lovers warm and fuzzy, Elliott says surveyors discovered the flora in question was one of the oldest known oak trees on the East Coast—although he couldn’t give Ace exact details on its age. Ace would suggest cutting it down to count the rings, but realizes that’d kind of defeat the purpose.

And as if the 606/743 revamps didn’t provide enough construction fun, the Virginia Department of Transportation has scheduled another overhaul to the airport-adjacent roadways in the near future. VDOT apparently wised up to the fact that traffic between 29N and the ‘port on Route 649 has gotten awfully heavy of late, and the State plans starting late this summer to turn it into a four-lane road. The project should be completed about a year after that and should include a new complementary traffic roundabout at the airport.

Yes, yes—safety, better roads—it’s all very good. You may now return to your in-flight movie.

I SAW YOU – Last week at the Downtown ACAC. You: buff business type, reading GQ on treadmill. Me: petite brunette wearing UVA sweatshirt. You caught me peeking at you over my Shape magazine while you were talking with your friend about real estate. Later, you drove by me in your BMW. Take me for a ride?

The above encounter never happened. But it could have, because the characters in the fictional personal ad represent two of Charlottesville’s most common stereotypes, at least according to Claritas, a California marketing firm. Specifically, the hotshot guy is what Claritas calls an “Executive Suite.” He makes around $70,000 a year and watches “Will & Grace.”

One of 66 detailed American caricatures described on the Claritas webpage, the Executive Suite is a white-collar professional “drawn to comfortable homes and apartments within a manageable commute to downtown jobs, restaurants and entertainment.”

The smitten gym vixen is an “Up-And-Comer.” A 20something who likes to party, she drives around “second-tier cities” in her Mitsubishi Eclipse, watches MTV and rents a swinging bachelorette pad—perhaps she’s moving into one of the newly refurbished apartments at Norcross Station?

Reducing Charlottesville to a handful of caricatures might not be the most politically correct way of gauging our gaggle, but it works. Claritas and many other market research firms produce reams of information about the habits, hobbies, brand affinities and socioeconomic realities of virtually every segment of society. The thinking goes that the huckster ethnography, termed “neighborhood lifestyle segmentation” by Claritas, is possible because people are easy to pigeonhole.

Claritas dips deep into the cliché well to describe the central theory behind “You Are Where You Live,” the free, stripped-down version of the company’s marketing models, available at claritas.com. Claritas claims that the system works because “birds of a feather flock together.

“It’s a worldwide phenomenon that people with similar cultural backgrounds, needs, and perspective naturally gravitate toward one another,” Claritas says.

Therefore, every neighborhood can be divvied up like a high school hallway. The cliques stick together, and are as easy to spot as the hoods, jocks, nerds and the foreign exchange student in an ’80s movie. A real-life example of this human tendency is when immigrants congregate in specific enclaves, such as the Ethiopian communities in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., or the Hmongs in the Twin Cities.

Upscale gym lurkers aren’t the only Charlottesville residents Claritas funnels into categories like cows in a chute. For instance, the company has identified the working class paragons of Americana, dubbed “Red, White & Blues,” who hang out in the 22911 ZIP code, which encompasses a chunk of Albemarle County east of town, including Pantops. A good perch from which to spot this cluster might be a table at the Tip Top during the lunch rush.

“Red, White & Blues typically live in exurban towns rapidly morphing into bedroom suburbs. Their streets feature new fast-food restaurants, and locals have recently celebrated the arrival of chains like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Payless Shoes,” Claritas says.

Despite their affinity for strip mall retail chains, these folks are into protecting the environment and like to paint and draw. They read Hot Rod magazine and often drive Chevy Trackers.

Another nearby stop on a Charlottesville stereotyping safari might be the Everyday Cafe, also in 22911, where one can observe the so-called “Country Squires” in their natural environment. This group and their Wal-Mart-loving brethren account for two of the five most common people “clusters” in the area. In the illustration that accompanies the marketing profile—Claritas includes cute drawings of each stereotype doing their thing, the better to help retailers envision their clientele—the Country Squire is wearing a riding cap and standing in front of a horse and white picket fence. If you look long enough, you might spot a Country Squire when she pulls up to the Everyday Café in her GMC Denali to pick up a latté and a copy of USA Today.

“In their bucolic communities noted for their recently built homes on sprawling properties, the families of executives live in six-figure comfort,” Claritas says of Country Squires, adding that their turf is “an oasis for affluent Baby Boomers who’ve fled the city for the charms of small-town living.”

Sound familiar?

Claritas first developed its demographic analysis 30 years ago. And though a well-known progenitor of the market research field of “geodemographics,” the company is hardly alone in compiling detailed information about Americans. Market research in the United States is a $6.2 billion-a-year industry, and is gaining in clout each year, according to Euromonitor International, itself a market research firm.

Marketers track and scrutinize virtually every move a consumer makes. The Washington Post’s webpage now requires the age, profession and all-important Zip code from readers before granting access to Web versions of news stories. The Los Angeles Times asks about online purchases and requires Web readers to disclose their household income. These readers’ specs likely find their way to Claritas, which also gathers information from media audits.

Though the freebie data from Claritas doesn’t say who reads C-VILLE Weekly, the firm’s profiles include several local characters who match up with our auditing data. The “Greenbelt Sports,” who are usually college educated and like to backpack and mountain bike, are likely candidates to pick up a copy of this newspaper. But somewhat surprisingly, from a stereotyping point of view, research suggests that the Greenbelt Sports might appreciate a column on professional wrestling—they love their wrasslin’.

The root source for market research is the U.S. Census, which is conducted every decade, most recently in 2000. This work is then refined by the surveys and research of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most notably in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which provides data on the incomes and buying habits of Americans. Marketing firms subsequently pile on the research with phone and Internet surveys, as well as data collected from the customer rolls of companies. Claritas draws from 1,600 private and public sources to develop its neighborhood profiles.

The result is that advertisers and businesses can know, in astonishing detail, who they are targeting at in a neighborhood or any other place where people come together, such as an airplane, sporting event or morning commute. Market research isn’t necessary in every situation: It should be self-evident that a Banana Republic billboard featuring androgynous models (why does he look so sullen?) might not have the intended effect if placed beside a rural Texas highway. But for subtle consumer preferences, such as whether Ivy residents like pizza from Papa John’s, Claritas has the skinny.

For example, the “Boomtown Singles,” a young set who rent apartments on the west side of town, would be good targets for a liquor promotion. But where can you catch this crowd? Sure, these entry-level office workers like to stay active, and can be found in soccer leagues or jogging on the Mall—such as in the Claritas illustration, where a woman in a yellow sweat suit is seen scooting along with her trusty Dalmatian. But a Guinness toast doesn’t seem like a good fit during a soccer game. Fortunately, Claritas knows the Boomtown Singles like to rock out to alternative music—a tip that could lead the savvy liquor promoter to place a call to Starr Hill or the Tokyo Rose.

Market research is about making safe bets. An example of this strategy is the play lists for New York City radio stations. In such a giant media market, the stations want to appeal to the greatest number of possible listeners. That means the quirky programming you might hear on WNRN 91.9 FM would never fly in the big city, where Nelly’s “Hot In Herre” can dominate the airwaves for an entire summer.

The Claritas stereotypes for Charlottesville, though not inclusive of all residents, are calibrated to the most common types of people you might see around town. The six most prevalent Claritas stereotypes in Charlottesville’s 22902 Zip code, which includes the area east of Ridge-McIntire and south of the Rivanna River, are the Executive Suites, Suburban Pioneers, Hometown Retired, Family Thrifts, Bedrock America and the hard-luck Mobility Blues, whose name is in reference to their transience. On the other side of town, south of 250 and west of Ridge-McIntire, including UVA and some of Ivy, you’re most likely to run into the so-called City Startups, New Beginnings, Boomtown Singles, Mobility Blues, again, and the gym cruising Up-and-Comers.

Remember the guy who was sitting at the next table at Duner’s last weekend, the one who was yakking about the story he’d read in Rolling Stone? And though he was somewhat stylish, he had the sheen of someone who might hit a Hooters or watch “That ‘70s Show”? He was definitely a “Young Influential”—a common resident of 22901. Claritas says his tribe “reflects the fading glow of acquisitive yuppiedom.”

Scottsville residents: Like fast cars and fast women? Have a small apartment and gloomy service industry job? Perhaps you’re a member of the “Young & Rustic” segment. Though Scottsville may be sprucing itself up with money from the State and with talk of new subdivisions, the Claritas specs say the town has retained its old-school core. For instance, joining the Young & Rustics are the “Crossroads Villagers,” who own handguns and like to order videos by mail (no word on what type of videos).

Perhaps these two Scottsville groups enjoy socializing with the “Bedrock Americans,” a prevalent posse in Charlottesville, who are seen wearing tank tops and Daisy Dukes in the Claritas illustration. With a median household income of $25,692, a third of this group fail to graduate from high school, and a full quarter of them live in mobile homes.

Clear Channel Communications, the media mega-conglomerate that owns radio and television stations, billboards and performance venues—including six radio stations in this market—has often drawn on Claritas’ expertise. In one particular success story cited by Claritas, Clear Channel used the market research to help sell tickets to a Minneapolis performance of a traveling children’s show that included life-size characters from a Bible-based cartoon. Claritas helped Clear Channel target clusters from among the group’s fan club. Clear Channel’s then e-mailed these likely attendees and generated $70,000 in advance ticket sales.

Many other companies from a variety of industries are on the Claritas client list, including BMW, Eddie Bauer and the L.A. Times. Claritas helped a “family dining” restaurant chain, whose name Claritas has kept on the down low, expand beyond its 300-plus franchises around the country. By targeting clusters of likely customers in every metropolitan area in the United States, Claritas developed a “Game Plan Matrix” for the chain that pinpointed the best markets for expansion, as well as a plan for where to place specific restaurants within those cities.

If the massive amount of retail space in the massive Albemarle Place project on 29N begins to fill up, chains may use the population-sorting methods from Claritas or other companies in deciding whether to move into the center. The low-income Mobility Blues may “excel in going to the movies,” but will there be enough of them spilling out of the proposed movie theater to justify building another Burger King? Furthermore, will the big-spending Country Squires drive to the shopping mall if it includes a Pottery Barn?

There are, of course, people who find the entire premise of “lifestyle segmentation” distasteful. With the nation growing more diverse every year—see, for example, California, which is now home to more minorities than whites—do we all fall neatly into 66 character sketches? Still, the persistence of “birds of a feather” is tough to deny. Opposites don’t attract, even in the melting pot. The black middle class seems to settle in mostly black suburbs, more Jewish families reside in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. than in the Virginia ‘burbs, according to a recent Washington Post article, and other ethnicities continue to clump together in neighborhoods all over the country, despite the efforts of well-meaning city planners.

“The United States might be a diverse nation when considered as a whole, but block by block and institution by institution it is a relatively homogenous nation,” writes David Brooks, in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Brooks cites the example of newly developed suburbs in Arizona and Nevada, which he says often begin as integrated communities. But as these communities develop reputations and personalities, they gradually shift and solidify into clusters. Eventually, the Young Influentials and Family Scrambles will have their spots, and everybody in town will know where they are. If you’re a Claritas-dubbed Boomtown Single in Phoenix on business, you’ll likely find a bar that caters to your crowd. As Claritas says, that’s just human nature.

In the book The Clustered World, Michael J. Weiss, a journalist who has long covered the geodemographics industry, writes that he finds comfort in the “benign nature of the clusters” and in the fact that marketers are targeting group behavior rather than that of individuals.

“I recognize that the basic clustering concept, that people in the same neighbourhood tend to behave (or at least consume) in the same way, goes back to cave-dweller time. The clusters simply help describe our diverse world today—the good, the bad, the dull, the outlandish,” Weiss writes.

Presumably cave dwellers would fall into far fewer marketing clusters than do Americans today. And even more encouragingly, this trend seems to have continued over the years. Back in the ’70s, Claritas could size up every neighborhood with only 40 clusters. But now we’ve swelled to 66 categories, having accounted for 62 just recently. That’s progress. At this rate, perhaps Americans will eventually outgrow easy stereotypes, and Bedrock Americans will be difficult to distinguish from the City Startups or Mobility Blues.

If you or I were to enter Donald Trump’s apartment—or, as Trump calls it, “the most beautiful apartment in the whole world”—we would at best stifle a burst of helpless laughter. It is testimony to the combined power of television and greed that the contestants on “The Apprentice”—NBC’s new internship reality television show, airing Thursdays at 9pm—enter the apartment in a state of awed supplication, cooing and giggling over the gilded door knobs and the too-obvious-to-even-be- considered-metaphorical mirrors. And then they start to suck up. It says a lot about both the show and Trump himself—who is co-producer and star—that the apartment tour was that week’s prize.

“The Apprentice” is now in its ninth week, and its relative success in the crowded field of amateur hour productions—from “American Idol” to “Fear Factor”—hinges upon its ingenious grafting together of “Survivor” with ’80s teensploitation flick Risky Business.

The contestants—who have been carefully selected to represent a wide variety of stereotypes, from the scrappy loud-mouth salesman to the slick, bitchy consultant—are split into teams of men and women. The teams then go head-to-head in entrepreneur-themed tasks. The first week, they sold lemonade. The next, they designed an ad campaign. Another competition was a kind of conspicuous-consumption scavenger hunt, in which teams hunted for the best prices on a shopping list that included gold bullion, a high-end “Big Bertha” golf club and a leg waxing for a member of the team, including the men. (An altogether painful form of hilarity ensued.)

The losing team sends the three members deemed “most responsible” for the failure to “the boardroom,” where Mr. Trump himself decides, along with his toadying pair of corporate advisers, who will hear “You’re fired.”

What does it mean that a show that asks us to root for someone to lose his or her job has found an audience in the midst of a jobless economic recovery? Are we that callous, or that unselfconscious? Or maybe, like the contestants—and like our president—the audience is focused on the prize, not the punishment that’s meted out along the way.

The winner of “The Apprentice” will get the “dream job of a lifetime” with the Trump Organization and a salary of $250,000. It’s never spelled out any more clearly than that, though while watching the show, I often wonder about what this “dream job” might be. The young contestants talk as if it were some combination of a winning lottery ticket and a papal dispensation, alternating between statements like, “If I get that job I’ll be set for life” and “I’ve got to let Mr. Trump see that I’m the one who really deserves that job.” But what if the job is to arrange The Donald’s toupees in alphabetical order? Or polishing the stripper poles in his casinos?

Even if the job is official fluffy bed inspector or chief chocolate-covered-strawberry taster, it is probably better—from the show’s producers’ point of view—to keep the specifics from the contestants. Because once a job’s duties are delineated, you can reasonably ask yourself, “What would I do to get it?” But if it’s some imaginary “dream job of a lifetime,” how do you put a limit on what you’ll sacrifice? And make no mistake: The sacrifices made by the contestants on “The Apprentice” go much farther than simply unsightly leg hair.

There are the relatively minor indignities of the tasks themselves, but then there’s what they do to win. The women’s team has resorted to flashing their bellies at fishmongers to get a better price on squid on the luxury-item scavenger hunt. A member of the men’s team openly begged Trump—and asked if it would help if he got on his knees—to keep his place on the show.

I suppose the drawing and quartering of an individual’s dignity is at the heart of the appeal of all reality shows. What makes the shamelessness of the “The Apprentice” contestants so engrossing is the poverty of the stakes they are competing for. The competitors on other shows win money. But some poor saps on “The Apprentice” are going to have to keep suffering humiliation at the hands of The Donald, long after the final credits end.

This story originally appeared in In These Times.

Q: Hey Ace, I love Charlottesville and all, but sometimes you just need to get out of town and into the real center of the universe. I’m talking about the city so nice they named it twice, New York, New York. What’s the best way to get from here to there?—Manny Hattan

A: The lights, the sights, the peeing in the streets. Ace misses New York sometimes, too, Manny. In fact, on one visit, he waited at a crosswalk next to Dr. Ruth Westheimer herself. That was a sexy trip! In the spirit of giving and receiving, Ace is happy to share with you several current options for getting to the Big Apple, and even happier to tell you about another one on the way.

Ace confirmed with developer Oliver Kuttner (who spearheaded Downtown’s Terraces project, among others) that he’s working on a new fancy-dancy bus line to EnWhySee, which he hopes to get on the road sometime this year. Kuttner says few details have been nailed down, but since he’s a racecar builder Ace can at least guarantee it’ll be a hell of a ride.

Until then, however, there are more pedestrian forms of public transport. For the high-flying set, The Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Airport sends several airplanes to New York through its main airline, US Airways. You can grab a nonstop flight to New York’s LaGuardia Airport three times daily Mondays through Fridays, at 6:45am, 11:55am and 4:25pm, or twice daily on weekends, at the same morning times. At a mere hour and 40 minutes from takeoff to landing, it’s by far the fastest way to get there. And let’s not forget those nummy peanuts. But it’ll cost ya anywhere from $334 to $700 round trip (depending on how early you book tickets).

Amtrak offers a somewhat cheaper alternative, with two express trains leaving the Charlottesville railroad stop on W. Main Street daily at 7:05am and 4:21pm, both of which pull into a stop at Penn Station. Round-trip tickets run $178 for coach or $505 for a sleeper cabin, which you very well may need for the roughly seven-hour trek.

But that ain’t got nothin’ on the marathon trip you’d take on Greyhound. There’s no express service bus available until after Washington, D.C., so expect stops at every ’ville and ’burg between here and the nation’s capital. Three buses headed the New York way leave the Charlottesville Greyhound station on W. Main daily, at 9am, 12:40pm and 8:15pm. The bus line estimates an eight-hour travel time to New York’s scenic Port Authority. As someone who’s taken that trip several times, Ace can tell you to prepare for more like 10 to 12 soul-deadening hours. But the price is right: At only $58 for a round-trip ticket, that leaves plenty of bucks to blow on miniature statues of Liberty and falafel from sidewalk vendors.