For decades, our nation’s Price Is Right spokesmodels have pulled on their sequined coveralls and high-heeled work boots, and marched dutifully into the game show factory for another day of pulling levers and pointing. As Upton Sinclair wrote in his historic game show exposé, The Jungle, “Into this wild-beast tangle these models had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded.” Each day, they point and they pull and they smile, as all around them the contestants erupt in the hog-squeal of the universe over the price of a refrigerator.
But once in every generation, a hero comes along who refuses to be a cog, who would rather be a wrench in the great works of the machine. And yesterday, that hero was model Manuela Arbelaez, who stood up to the human Plinko that is the system and said, “No more will we be pawns in your sick game! No more will we play by The Man’s cruelly arbitrary rules and deceptively close dollar amounts! Today, I will just give you a Hyundai.”