Child Abuse
Sometimes you can find political messages in places where you least expect them. Here’s a couple of examples that are similar enough (and struck me in the same way) that I thought I’d throw them together into a post. The first comes from the blog of television chef Alton Brown reacting to the movie “Supersize Me” :
What shocked me about the movie wasn?t what it said, or. Heck I already new most of that stuff. What shocked me were the gasps I heard from the audience, most of whom seemed generally surprised that big business could be so?well?business like.Here?s what it comes down to kids. Ronald McDonald doesn?t give a damn about you. Neither does that little minx Wendy or any of the other icons of drivethroughdom. And you know what, they?re not supposed to. They?re businesses doing what businesses do. They don?t love you. They are not going to laugh with you on your birthdays, or hold you when you?re sick and sad. They won?t be with you when you graduate, when your children are born or when you die. You will be with you and your family and friends will be with you. And, if you?re any kind of human being, you will be there for them. And you know what, you and your family and friends are supposed to provide you with nourishment too. That?s right folks, feeding someone is an act of caring. We will always be fed best by those that care, be it ourselves or the aforementioned friends and family.
We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.
Feed yourselves.
Feed your loved ones.
And for God?s sake feed your children.Don?t trust anyone else to do it?not anyone. I?m not saying that you shouldn?t go out to dinner every now and then?that is after all one of the great joys of life?but it isn?t life itself and that?s what I?m talking about.
Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn?t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn?t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn?t hug.
The second quote is from Troma Studios founder Lloyd Kaufman’s book All I Needed To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From “The Toxic Avenger”. In the chapter detailing the process of getting their cartoon “The Toxic Crusaders” onto the small screen, Kaufman makes this alarming discovery :
The Cartoons Most People Under 25 Have Grown Up With Are Actually InfomercialsBy the early 1908’s, the FCC, under the Reagan administration, had relaxed its regulations on TV. A host of children’s programming that was primarily commercials for toy lines, from GI Joe to Thundarr the Barbarian to He Man, were allowed on the air. Not long after, “barter syndication” became possible; that is, a toy company or animators would give their half-hour cartoon toy commercials to television for next to nothing or free, to the benefit of both companies. In the mid-1980s, Lorimar Telepictures broke new ground with Thundercats, actually paying TV stations a percentage of the sales of the toys would reap in the broadcast area. TV stations became merchandising parters, saturating afternoon TV with kiddie brainwashing, while simultaneously selling commercial time within these commercials. Classic animated efforts like Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, and the old Looney Tunes were gone forever. The elites had infiltrated the entertainment industry in secret ways to the permanent detriment of quality.
[The book adds the following footnote : “Most of this information is from Carnival Culture (1992), by the great pop-culture historian and theoretician James B. Twitchell.”]
With all the outrage over evil corporations being evil corporations, we should all make sure there’s some blame left over for parents too lazy to properly raise their children. If Ronald McDonald is your chef and GI Joe is your babysitter, don’t be surprised when your kid grows up to be an unhealthy moron.
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thank you…
now, why is it that whenever i go on a bitter-old-man rant about these exact same subjects, i get accused of being… well… a bitter old man.
having 5 nieces and nephews, all under the age of 11, is a hard thing to witness these days. it’s sad to see the kind of “culture” they’re growing up with these days. and it’s even sadder to see how cynical they are at such a very young age.
we were the generations that grew up to be slackers and gen-x. what the hell are kids today going to grow up to be? can it sink any lower?
Comment by tom — January 26, 2005 @ 9:38 pm
what the hell are kids today going to grow up to be? can it sink any lower?
Yes, it can
Comment by thehim — January 26, 2005 @ 9:42 pm
tom writes: “what the hell are kids today going to grow up to be? can it sink any lower?”
thehim writes: Yes, it can
A.Hitler wrote: Give me the nation’s children for ten years, and I will show you the face of the new era. Yeah, it can be a lot worse.
Comment by Tom S — January 26, 2005 @ 10:37 pm
I didn’t buy GI Joe because I think war should not be confused with fun time. I didn’t buy a Cabbage Patch doll because I didn’t think any child should be that desperate for a toy. I didn’t censor their environment too often because I thought we should be talking about all aspects of life. I raised them in the Unitarian tradition because I didn’t have all the answers and I had no problem with them thinking for themselves. I also taught them how to have a decent food fight and to cuss properly. Now they are terrific grown ups just as I knew they would be.
Comment by Becky — January 27, 2005 @ 10:58 am
It seeems to me that there is some group somewhere that would be on record against this crap. Probably Commercial Alert, or some Nader group.
As usual with this sort of thing, Democrats are as guilty as Republicans, or as complicit anyway. Next time the FCC censors someone for showing a tit on television, be sure and point out that while a tit may be a little out-of-line, 5 hours of thirty-minute commercials aimed at those least able to distinguish fact from fantasy is f*cking obscene. And counting it as “public-service” is f*cking crazy.
Comment by Joe — January 27, 2005 @ 12:38 pm
I’ve been thinking about this post overnight, and I do think that Alton Brown’s post is a tad naive. It should be obvious to any parent that fast food should not be the staple of their kids’ diets, but is cooking at home much better? I was raised by parents who meant well, and didn’t do a shitty job of feeding me, but at the same time, I was eating mostly canned fruit cocktail, drinking Crystal Light, eating pasta sauce out of a jar–we were still eating mass-produced foods from companies that didn’t care about us.
In the past, families could survive on only one income, but now it takes two parents working long hours to make ends meet, and sitting kids in front of a T.V. or cooking something pre-packaged is not just the easy way out–sometimes it’s the only solution in a stressful day where the schedule is tight.
I dunno, I’m not a parent, but I sympathize. I don’t think it’s wrong to demand that our products and television shows have some kind of standards, because they can’t spend hours every evening cooking from scratch and reading to their kids, even though they may wish they could.
Comment by dAnimal — January 27, 2005 @ 1:05 pm
dAnimal, cooking at home with food produced by industrial agriculture isn’t much better, but our parents didn’t know that way back in the 1980s. Now there’s no excuse. Check out http://www.informedeating.org
also, hi Dan!
Comment by Joe — January 27, 2005 @ 1:25 pm
dAnimal-
i work an average of 12-14 hours a day and i still manage to cook 90% of my meals. sure i’m just a one person household, but it wouldn’t be much different (in time) to cook for 3-4.
i also read the labels of everything i eat, and try to eat organic almost exclusively.
cooking at home is ALWAYS better than eating out. cooking at home with fresh, organic ingredients is even better.
it’s not very difficult, it’s just that most people who don’t do this, think that it’s difficult. it’s like excercizing- when you don’t do it, it seems like a difficult thing to make time for, but once you start doing it regularly, it’s easy and doesn’t take much time out of your day.
Comment by tom — January 27, 2005 @ 2:15 pm
Joe, tits are never, repeat, never out of line. Ever. Unless they’re Justice Dispencing tits, in which case they must be covered with curtains.
And Tom, I second your emotion.
Comment by Ross A Lincoln — January 27, 2005 @ 3:26 pm
Er, That’s Justice dispensing. I just committed one of my most hated offenses. My apologies.
Comment by Ross A Lincoln — January 27, 2005 @ 3:27 pm