Category — Living Now

I grew up on 1970′s television. I can probably re-enact every Gilligan’s Island plot and can quote the Brady Bunch at will (I guess; no one’s asked me in a while).

I watched hours and hours and hours of television.

And here I am, 41 years old and a somewhat well-adjusted member of society. So what’s my deal with the endless rants about smashing the TV?

Here’s the thing: There was a difference between commercial entertainment then and the media monstrosity we’ve got now. A big difference. Spending hours at the mercy of mellow 70′s passive entertainment – on maybe five different channels, tops – is admittedly troubling, and may be the reason I never became a lawyer, let’s say. Ultimately not the best way to spend a childhood (God knows).

But: Spending hours and hours (and hours) with hyper-realistic, psychologically manipulative, adult-oriented, sexualized, super-violent, and emotionally intrusive material – across 500 channels or whatever – is a whole different thing. And that’s what we’ve got today. In the 70′s watching too much television was a troubling social concern. Today it really does threaten our democracy.

Of course, we can’t look back at newsreels from the 50s without cracking up at the horn-rimmed, slicked-hair squares bemoaning the “dangers of rock ‘n roll”. Turns out Elvis wasn’t the end of civilization as we knew it, after all.

But it’s a whole new ballgame today. Just consider the sneering, nasty tone of commercial entertainment, which alone is enough to make us want to toss the thing in the closet and run to the nearest library. That’s even before we consider the disinformation that passes for “news” (70% of Americans blamed Iraq for 9/11 – enough said) or the consumerist blatherings that spin us into thinking that a fulfilled life is defined by a pursuit for self-gratification. And I’m just getting started.

Popular culture can be – and has been – truly great, and even great art. But when it exists as part of a pre-conceived marketing plan, it’s manipulative junk. More and more of today’s commercial entertainment – which after all comes by way of a shrinking handful of media conglomerates – carries a “hidden agenda”. It’s getting harder to know what’s really being sold with the entertainment we’re getting, with viral videos of “amateurs” that turn out to be music label plants on YouTube, or “news” shows that do in-depth “features” of films produced by another department of the television network. Or military “experts” who appear objective but are planted, pro-war messengers instead.

Democracy remains the best form of social arrangement we’ve got. But just as businesses need well-defined property laws or a well-run postal system in order to operate best, democracies require a well-informed public that can make thoughtful, wise decisions. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? We could end up with a president we want to share a beer with instead of a well-qualified leader. Shudder. Just imagine what might happen in a world like that.

We all know about our lousy health care system. But when you actually tangle with it firsthand and try to guide someone you care about through the madness, it’s like a nightmare that turns real.

Let me tell you, there is nothing more frustrating and – I’ll admit it – frightening than watching a parent’s chances reduced to what their insurance will or (more often) won’t cover. You’re standing in a hospital as if you’re talking about a car transmission but it’s your father that’s sitting there in a daze. And it comes down to is this: If he can pay, he can live. If he can’t, he may not.

We’ve assigned our very existence a dollar value.

This is totally nuts. After all, OUR government ought to take care of OUR needs. But take a look at recent American history objectively and you’d think that our government’s main purpose is to simply fight more effective and aggressive wars. We’ve forgotten that government exists because theoretically, a centralized authority representing the will of the majority is supposed to address our needs better than might be possible for us as individuals. But 25 years of conservative government – topped off with a $3 trillion war – has brought us to the edge of financial ruin. We can’t take care of people who need help because – as Vonnegut used to say – we’re too damned cheap. Or maybe it’s that we’ve handed over our democracy to a minority corporate power whose interests are not aligned with just about everyone else.

Meantime, you have to hold your breath as you drive over another rusted, tumbledown overpass or past another dying city, while we can’t even provide life-saving care when it’s needed most. Something is very, very wrong here.

So where’s the mass outrage? There ought to be marching in the streets by now. Maybe the general indifference can be blamed on the corporate media, which redirects justified anger towards paper tigers, like “communists” or “liberals” or “the clash of civilizations.” At the same time we soak our brains in hours of commercial entertainment which has one sole aim: To get us to fill our homes with more stuff, to think about our next car or ‘gotta have it’ gadget, as if things will give meaning and provide contentment to our lives. They never do. But we keep falling for it, time after time. It’s easy to forget that life is for living, not just an opportunity to go shopping.

The bottom line is that it’s not “other people” who need affordable, comprehensive health care. It’s everyone: Our parents, our kids, our best friends. Someday, inevitably, it’ll be you and me.

This is a site about progressive change. So I’ll end this post on a positive note: Maybe it’s time to “unplug and de-program” ourselves; turn off the media manipulations and re-focus on the things that matter. And convince your neighbor to do the same thing.

Resources

There are many organizations working to address our sick health care situation. Here are a few:

• HealthCare Now
• Guaranteed Healthcare (check the petition for “CheneyCare”)
• Nine-Nine-Oh-Nine: Healthcare for ALL by 9/9/09

On a day when Hillary Clinton’s going negative is getting rave reviews I thought I’d take a breather from politics. I heard an interview with the author of a new book about the Best Picture nominees for the 1968 Oscars called Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood; really interesting stuff.

’68 was a pivotal year for Hollywood films; movie makers had finally shaken off the “moral” limitations of the Production Code and started taking on cultural taboos in a more direct – and honest – manner. It kicked off a Hollywood artistic revival that lasted about ten years and included some of the best films ever made, right up until The Blockbusters in the mid-seventies when Uni-Studio came along and ate up the movies.

I don’t know if movies can change the world but really good ones can push things along once in a while.

Here’s a clip from In the Heat of the Night, one of the all-time great films, and starring the always elegant Sidney Poitier. The clip here has been referred to as “the slap heard round the world” and I think you’ll see why:

That’s Rod Steiger as the sherrif and I understand he tried that “I don’t know” line eighteen times until he got it right. He sure does get it right. I’ve also heard Poitier explain that in the original script, his character was supposed to take that slap with the typical stoicism expected of black characters in a Hollywood film. But he refused to play it that way and the result is a watershed moment. Hope you enjoy.

If I could change any one thing, I would…

Keep corporate entertainment away from my kids.

I’ve really had it with the corporate media’s entertainment bread and circuses. My kids are unplugged for the most part and I hope to keep it that way. Today they’re fun-loving, confident children; why should I watch as their self-worth is destroyed by their worrying over how thin they are, or how thick their lips are, or other meaningless trivialities? The sexualization of young girls in the media is truly frightening for anyone with children. It can lead to all kinds of psychological disorders, according to the APA. But honestly, we don’t need a press release to understand these things.

I want my children to take pride in their capabilities. I want them to be mindful about things that matter, about how kind they are, about how they should treat their friends. These values are mostly absent from anything that pops out of the tube or sits on the magazine rack at the checkout counter. They’re certainly missing from commercial entertainment.

Spend an hour with corporate entertainment and the one thing that you walk away with is the cheapness of everything. It’s everywhere, in the snide, snappy, mean-spirited digs in commercials or sitcoms; in many movies, which have “gun tracks” instead of music tracks – how many murders can one person watch in two hours? This cheapness leaves the impression that “nothing really matters”. But things DO matter. There really are implications to our actions. When you live in a commercial-infused TV reality, it’s very easy to lose sight of this.

Corporate advertisers know exactly what they’re doing; they go after our kids, exploiting young minds who’ve yet to develop the skills to understand that advertising is not “the truth” but rather a manipulation. Advertisers recognize this phenomenon and even boast about doing it. When you manipulate minors for your own benefit and at their expense, well, that’s called molestation under any other situation and I think that’s what commercial TV is doing to kids. We have laws in the US against this kind of thing; why should it be OK when it comes in the form of cartoony characters?

We have drug-free school zones; how about commercial-free school zones too?

I’m all for free speech – passionately – but this is not a free speech issue. I know there are plenty of “small government” folks who don’t agree with regulations, and besides it’s hard to imagine the kinds of laws that exist in other countries being passed here in the US to control advertising to children. But we can do the next best thing by turning our backs on the thing. If you have kids you should take pride in keeping commercial TV away from them.

Maybe if more people understood the danger to kids from TV they would simply turn it off. Imagine if 25 million – 50 million – just millions and millions of Americans unplugged themselves from corporate entertainment as a protest. What a message that would send!

Here’s a social experiment to try. There are few things more frightening – enlightening? – than NOT watching commercial entertainment for a set period, say three months, and then taking a peek. You’ll be amazed, believe me. I’ve done it.

What do you think? Leave a comment!

If you’re interested in this topic here are a few resources to browse:

• Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood
• New American Dream (their page on Kids and Commercialism is outstanding)
• Commercial Alert has a Parents’ Bill of Rights petition to send Congress