Marketing

One of the downsides of getting old, besides aches and pains and boring young people, is witnessing little changes only an older person notices. Whatever is going on in the moment has “always” been going on in the eyes of the young. The fact is they have no point of reference and are not responsible for succumbing to the sometimes subtle and other times not so subtle insinuative political/corporate propaganda of our daily lives. The only way to avoid this toxic nonsense would be to turn off your TV and computer, stop reading all corporate media (aka. media), stop going to the movies and take yourself to some remote mountain top and become a subsistence farmer. It’s never too late.

This deliberate manipulation is evident at the movies. I love movies. I love all aspects; the writing, acting, directing and editing all fascinate me, a true communal effort and a miracle of sorts when they are successful. When I go to the movie theater I arrive early because I want a good seat, but unfortunately that requires that I sit through a twenty minute audio/visual barrage of corporate crap telling me the answer to life can be found in some colorful sugar water product that can make me “fly” or I must watch some empty headed fluff on TV as soon as I get home and/or I should feel awful because soldiers are coming home horribly damaged from places they don’t belong and that our government abandons them to the charity of people going to see a movie on a Saturday afternoon. Does anyone else remember movie shorts and cartoons before the feature?

There is also a trend in Hollywood productions to promote more adulation and glorification of military violence, both contemporary and historical. My guess is the rightwing conservative military/corporate cheerleaders have decided it is better to utilize Hollywood’s marketing abilities than to rail against it as they have in the past. The list of movies directly or indirectly praising our military might is long. I just watched a heart-wrenching film preview starring Mark Wahlberg as the sole survivor of a Navy Seals team rubbed out in some remote Afghani outback. The real life soldier survivor, Marcus Luttrell, had a special slot on the CBS Sunday morning program promoting the film and illustrating his tragic experience of seeing his fellows die, one by one at the hands of the Taliban. When did the CBS Sunday morning show become a recruiter for the armed forces? It used to educate and enlighten us with art and music and human interest. Why in hell are we still in Afghanistan, anyway? My perception of this is tempered with my memory of life before all this blatant propaganda, but to a young person this is their reality, their normalcy.

The TV is even more contaminated with shameless promotion of ignorance as a virtue (“Reality” TV) and sappy emotional manipulation of our natural compassion for the wounded warrior. We are led to focus on the soldier that needs our help, but are not allowed to ask why this is happening. Country singing star, Blake Shelton, brings us to tears when he sings of the sacrifice the soldier and his or her family makes while sitting in front of a Christmas tree where the ornaments are images of these Americans being affected by our endless wars. Every time I see this I feel beat down and guilty for questioning our Zombie-like military invasion of country after country in the name of, what exactly?

The average citizen makes absolutely zero sacrifice, yet is always yammering on about how they “support the troops”.  What is all this death and pain and suffering for? Don’t tell me it’s for freedom or I’ll puke. Killing families in Pakistan with drones is not promoting freedom. Murdering civilians in a rampage because some poor soldier has lost his mind after serving four or more “tours”, does not promote freedom. Invading and occupying a sovereign nation and terrorizing its population for over a decade does not promote freedom. Our country is like the junkie trying endlessly to recapture his first high. It will never happen. We have been desperate to relive the glory days of WW2 after our dismal failure in Vietnam. It will never happen. The same defeated psychopathic Vietnam era boomers that have risen to power shame our greatest generation with watered down quasi patriotism that in reality is simply a cash cow for our new privatized corporate military and a sad series of tragic war crimes.

I miss the not so distant past where there was no super-slick, mind-numbing, Madison Avenue blitzkrieg of bullshit telling me how to think, act and perform as a “good citizen”. Like many, I mourn the loss of real heroes who took us to the moon, promoted compassion for the less fortunate and worked to include ALL Americans in our political process. Today we wander from military conflict to military conflict, demonize and incarcerate the poor for being poor and pass regressive laws that exclude those citizens that only in the last fifty years have been included as active participants in our/their country. We have resurrected the simplistic “love it or leave it” mentality instead of working together to solve our very complex problems. Our government is in a self-induced paralysis and is owned and operated by private corporate interests. These soulless hyper-capitalists don’t give one whit for true patriotism or honor and country means next to nothing to their global corporate fiefdoms.

The once ubiquitous bumper sticker, “If You Are Not Outraged, You Are Not Paying Attention” has more relevance today than ever before.