TV's Children

Does capitalism have your children’s best interests at heart? Do you ever feel the need to protect them from what is shown on corporate-owned television, to restrict their young eyes not only from the programming itself but from the commercials?

Do you think the foods that are little more than sugar and processed flour are a result of anything other than the capitalist’s desire to prey on the young and the helpless, or do you actually think it is the fault of parents that children are facing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes?

I watched another of those video clips the other day about college students who couldn’t tell you who won the Civil War and yet could name who Brad Pitt was married to and what show Snookie was on. Like everyone else I was shockingly disappointed by the results and yet I shouldn’t have been surprised.

You see, a lot of people in their disgust blame the youth of today. They blame the education system, the government, the liberals, etc. But what those people are missing is the fact that they know what society teaches them. They are not ignorant, they have learned what society has told them is important. And what society tells them is that Snookie and the love lives of celebrities are important.

After all, we could have a different system if we wanted to. We could have media that actually teaches us something worth knowing. We could have a history channel that has programming about history, an arts and entertainment channel that has actual art and artists on it, or a music channel that deals with music. We could have whatever kind of media we want; it is a free country, we should decide.

But that’s not what we have. We are constantly being told that we live in the society we wanted, that our society is the result of our decisions. And yet the world is not what we want it to be. Why is that? Are we stupid? Assuredly we have our flaws, our weaknesses and are capable of being distracted by things not so important to us. Yes, we are imperfect, but that is not the whole story.

The fact is, our weaknesses are being played upon. There are those who work very hard and are paid very well to make sure we don’t focus on what is best for us but instead become distracted by that which is not vital to us. They are artists when it comes to playing upon our baser instincts, our sexual urges, our insecurities, and a myriad of other shortcomings. They manipulate us—there is no other term for it—into becoming pliable consumers willing to buy what they are selling.

And you cannot lay that at the feet of anyone other than the capitalists who own our media, who for the better part raise our children because they have taught us it is our duty to be at work rather than with them. We do our best to instill in them human values rather than corporate values but the television, the radio, and now a host of other media have far more of their time and attention than we ever will. We can try to keep them in a bubble, and some of us do, but they will not be able to avoid those others of their generation, the majority, that have been raised with values that are alien to the human race. Corporate values.

They cleverly tie cute cartoon creatures with sugary treats, designer labels, and violence. They hyper-sexualize adolescence and brand them when they are young so that by the time they are adults, they will not even see the cage that has built for them.

Aldous Huxley saw it clearly enough in 1931, put it all down for us to read in Brave New World. He saw the manipulation of young minds so that the adults they grew into would be incapable of thinking outside of established parameters. And you can bet that advertisers envisioned it too. Of course they did not see the damage it would cause, their narrow vision only saw the profit they could make from such a system. They pursued it the way any unthinking creature in an excited state pursues its prey. And they were very good at what they did.

So the next time you see people knowing nothing about their history and everything about the Kardashians, let it be known that our education system, the real one, the one that is fully funded, is doing its job capably.

Adulthood’s End Part 3 (The Illusion Of Choice)

     If there is one thing capitalism provides it’s choice. Go to your typical supermarket and you’ll find more options for frozen French Fries than is good for you. Seriously, you could waste the better part of an hour making sure you get the best value and the best option available. Same with the soda aisle: the variety screams out to us from the bright colors that decorate every box of cans. True too of bottled water. This is where it gets kinda weird: Why does anybody need 100 different varieties of bottled water? Can anyone tell me the difference? Nevertheless, this is America and you deserve 100 varieties of waters to choose from. Anything less would be socialism.

     But while 100 varieties of bottled water may seem like far more choices than we could possibly want, perhaps it is less than we actually need. Perhaps the mountain of plastic bottles blinds us to the option we’d actually prefer.

     Who having an option between clean, cheap tap water would prefer lugging home cases of the stuff from the supermarket? Who would prefer polluting the environment with plastic when we could totally eliminate the waste, again by providing drinking water through the tap? Who would prefer wasting our precious resources—in this case oil used in the production of plastic—when we could avoid all that? Especially when the Middle East is such a mess, it seems a shame to send our troops over there to fight and die for plastic bottles we really don’t need. Or for the fuel required for the trucks to unnecessarily ship bottles of water across the country.

     So who would come up with such a crazy system? Someone out to make a buck. Nobody’s going to get rich providing cheap tap water, especially when the government tends to stick its nose into such matters and make sure water will be available and affordable to even the poorest of us. So in the long run, those various different bottled water companies are not competing against each other, how can they? How can one of them make the claim that their water is better than the next guy’s? You can only do so much with a picture of a snow-capped mountain. There are only so many buzz words such as “pure”, “natural”, “life”, and “healthful” you can slap on the label and still keep them large enough to attract the eye.

     Of course, some try to argue they use less plastic than the typical bottled water, as if conservation of plastic were an argument they should bring up. Nestle’s Pure Life package proudly states it has an “eco-bottle”. Re-read that sentence just to drive home the idea of how screwed up we as a society are. If you wonder why people can’t think anymore it’s because vapid advertisement has broken our brains. Words don’t mean anything anymore, they’re just supposed to sound nice. And reassuring.

     So whose water you buy doesn’t matter, just so it comes in a bottle. Same with soda. Pepsi doesn’t mind if you buy Coke and Coke doesn’t care if you cheat on it with the occasional Pepsi. The important thing is you consume teeth-rotting diabetes juice because, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. And it works the same way with politics, only in reverse. In politics, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent not to entice you to buy but to turn you off from the entire process. They don’t care if you vote Democrat or Republican, their goal is to make you so disgusted with politics that you don’t vote at all.

     That’s the system we’ve worked out as a society. These are the choices you have. Well, not really, they are the choices that are laid out for you. These are the choices they want you to make, the world they try to fashion for you. But your choices are as vast as you can imagine them to be. You don’t have to buy their vision, you don’t have to fit your mind inside of the box they have prepared for you. It’s a small world offered and in the end we humans deserve better than the world they envision. Next time you are presented with a choice of a bottled of water or a can of soda, remember there’s always beer ;)

The End Of Adulthood Part 2

     It was the latter part of the 1970s and our president was discussing the fuel shortage. He gave a simple suggestion to turn our heat down a few degrees and wear a sweater if we were cold. It was the sort of advice our parents would have given us and that was the problem. You see, the first generation of children raised on television were now grown up and we did not want to listen to our parents anymore. We preferred to listen to our televisions because the television always told us what we wanted to hear. The television told us we deserved a break today, that sugary snacks were good for us, women were made to be ogled and there were no repercussions to casual sex. And so a new politician emerged to tell us of the new and improved classic homemade way of doing things. The television had a lovechild and he was called Ronald Reagan. He would explain our world the way we wanted to hear it, just like all those other neat guys on TV. We wanted a handsome and winning personality, not our stuffy old dad. We wanted Ronald Reagan, not Jimmy Carter. Hannity, not Colmes.

     We could have whatever we wanted. You go, girl, you deserve it. We could have whiter teeth AND fresher breath. We didn’t have to live with ring around the collar or waxy yellow build up anymore. And so when the voters went to the polls in November of 1980, the changes that had begun in the 1950s had finally come to fruition.

     The shift had taken place and the rift between generations, the one television had caused, was glossed over. Never again would we have to listen to adults. Nor would we ever be expected to become adults ourselves. We were all free now to leave the unpleasantness of making difficult decisions behind us. The only choosing we had to make was whether we would drink Miller Lite or Bud Light. We were the Pepsi generation and we were never going to grow old (or up).

     There was a new authority now, although we never chose to really think about it that way. We didn’t need parents anymore nor did we have to become them. We could be friends to our children rather than rule makers or—God forbid—role models. We could spend the time we weren’t making money to spend it. We could buy for a second time all the toys of our youth and never have to be responsible for anything. Because, after all, authority was not given to us, it belonged to the market place. By merely choosing between Pepsi or Coke, magic forces would make the world into a Heaven for us all. Authority was decreed through television waves that mystically travelled through the air and into the privacy of our houses. Complex decision making was uncool, we wanted our nation’s problems to be solved as easily and completely as Jack Tripper’s problems were every Tuesday night on ABC.

     As for getting older, well, that was something our parents did. We would have none of that, because growing older meant taking on responsibility, and television would take that burden from us. All we had to do was stay up on the latest trends, buy the products that were currently trendy. We just had to listen to the same music our kids did, pretend to find some value in it. Forget about finding meaning in our own lives, we had to find ways to relate to our children, even if in the end all we did was validate the line being sold to them by the advertisers.

     And when the lines and the droopiness and receding hairlines and e.d. showed up, well television was there with the answers. Our skin could look as smooth as Joan Rivers’, our boobs as perky as any saline-bag celebrity. And for guys, hey, it was just like the 60’s, only the drugs now were Rogaine and Viagra. Death was only an illusion, which meant we never had to worry too much about figuring what life was all about. All we had to do was hang onto our youth. All we had to do was keep flunking Maturity 101 so we never had to graduate.