No more need for soul-searching op-ed pieces about the spiritual health of the nation. We now know who we truly are: a bunch of ruthless, clueless, back-stabbing, indecisive, whining, mean-spirited wimps. And bad losers to boot.

Take any randomly selected group of Americans, strand them on a desert island and watch what shakes out. (Isn't this sort of what the Pilgrims did? And look what happened there!) It's like watching the history of the Republic unfold in microcosm. The scaly thing should rightly have been called Predator, and, given the scary state of the union that it reveals, we should be wringing our hands and wallowing in self-recrimination. Instead, people all across the country are holding tropical theme parties featuring, uh, grilled sting ray (tastes like rat!). And why not? We all want to be King Rat.

Of course, the base instincts in question here are really those of CBS (or so we like to think). It's the network executives, not us, who'd stoop to anything to clutch their even bigger pots of gold (a million dollars for every advertising minute). We're just the usual suspects, the bored and listless mob looking for kicks. It's easy to see how hard-pressed Roman promoters were forced to come up with more and more grisly gladiatorial spectacles at the Colosseum. And we're not so far off from witnessing it ourselves -- the great, remote-wielding national beast slobbering in a Barcalounger and demanding its bowl of blood.

The fiendish ingenuity of those producers! Coming of Age in Samoa has got nothing on this: the birth of a new junk genre. Survivor is almost a compendium of every kind of program now on television: game show, soap opera, court drama, whodunit, real-crime show, and pseudo-documentary -- all served up in a hokey, pop-anthropology, Gilligan's Island format.

They've even figured out how to dispense with those temperamental, money-grubbing stars, along with writers and directors. You hire "real people," put them in front of a camera and let them make up their own damn plots. Now all you need is some poor slob of an editor to watch the raw footage and choose the nasty parts. You create instant celebrities who are, by definition, disposable at the end of the season. Imagine that -- no more megalomaniac Roseannes or Seinfelds demanding billion dollar salaries. At a million dollars a pop, it's dirt cheap!

Unfortunately, the only person they seemed unable to dispense with was the set decorator. Polynesia wasn't Polynesian enough, apparently. The tribal council looked like a conversation pit at Trader Vics. I half expected to see the funny little umbrellas that go in drinks with names like Planter's Punch or The Outrigger. And the producers couldn't resist the Tarzan-movie tchatchkes, either -- you can bet that the vine-smothered voting urn and the Duck Tales totem pole will be showing up at your local K-Mart Martha Stewart department in the near future (the latter as a beach umbrella stand).

Survivor satisfies two primal impulses encoded in our national DNA: the quest for authenticity (even if you have to fake it) and our constitutional right to an ongoing fantasy life -- in other words, voyeurism and an insatiable appetite for more and more unbelievable spectacles.

But enough of this manufactured reality! I've tasted blood, now I want to see the real thing - a real-time Survivor that takes place in the boardroom at CBS. I want to see the sweat pouring off the executive vice president's face as he defends his pathetic fall line-up, the quavering voice of the producer as a CEO humiliates him in front of the board of directors. Makes him strip off his Armani suit and go clean the men's room. The tribe has spoken.