CSotD: Celebrating stupidity
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Foxtrot — which is still new on Sundays, though in reruns the rest of the week — scores with a poke at the exaltation of stupidity on television
As much as we may rail at the poor nutrition in fast food (including yesterday's yogurt/yoghurt rant), at least, if a food company makes a bogus claim about its food, it's possible to get them slapped down.
Poisoning bodies is not permitted. Poisoning minds is a different matter.
The First Amendment protects non-broadcaster broadcasters from claims of fraud.
The FCC has command of over-the-air broadcasters, though I suspect that, even if it did regulate cable channels, it would remain more interested in Janet Jackson's unscheduled nip-slip than anyone intentionally broadcasting fraudulent information about the existence of Bigfoot on the Discovery Channel or the Learning Channel or National Geographic or any of the other Idiocy Enhancement Services.
And their enforcement capability is pretty limited anyway: They lost the Battle of Janet's Tittie over their own failure to set coherent rules. Ditto with their attempt to rein in the F-bomb.
I once opined in a column that it would be interesting if the guy going out to sell TV ads and the guy going to testify before Congress accidentally switched briefcases, so that the lobbyist read a pitch to the Committee about the overwhelming persuasiveness of the medium while the ad man was assuring a major agency that television doesn't have any discernible effect on viewer behavior.
(Let me pause here to be clear: I support the First Amendment, and I believe in the free market. But I believe that letting advertisers know when they are being irresponsible and antisocial is part of that free market. It's also part of participatory democracy.)
The battle for ratings is based on exploiting our fascinations, which include both fear and lust and especially their overlap. And the idea that some of these exploiters are on our side is kind of bullshit when they're chasing clicks or rating points thereby.
The poster child for this being Chris Hansen, who has made himself a household name by exploiting the fascination of sexual assault on children by luring would-be predators out into the open on "Dateline NBC."
I believe the predators when they say it's the first time they've ever actually done anything, because I believe that the vast, vast majority of young people don't respond to creeps on-line and that sustained, encouraging responses come from undercover police more often than from legitimate victims, and that most sexual exploitation, on the net or in real life, is by friends and trusted adults rather than by strangers.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't stop it. I once got to do a ride-along as the cops busted a guy who was offering "in-home gynecological services," and he was not, shall we say, particularly credible.*
But however absurd his scam, the point of busting him was that there was a legitimate need to protect anybody who might be dumb enough to fall for his ridiculous posters, even if it were only one gullible person.
Thing is, I do not believe hand-written posters in laundromats offering in-home gynecological exams are a major threat to public safety. One story with a sidebar offering reaction, and then a short follow once the charges were filed and he pled.
Similarly, I have no problem with scamming scammers, and luring on-line pedophiles is perfectly legitimate, but exploiting people's fear of such a low-level threat with repeated examples over and over and over is not.
Educating young people to avoid sketchy situations, yes.
Building a ratings empire by fueling paranoia, no.
Telling people that Bigfoot is real, that aliens visit regularly, that Nostradamus saw the future, that ghosts wander the halls of creaking old buildings, may seem, taken bit by bit, fairly silly and harmless.
But just as we need to protect foolish people from on-line predators and in-home gynecologists, we should not exploit the gullible for profit.
It's not illegal but it is immoral and it also isn't good for the country.
We used to chuckle over how our parents' generation had fed us a steady diet of Robin Hood and Zorro and then, when the Sheriff of Nottingham was bombing rice fields in Vietnam and El Commandante was forcing farm workers to pick grapes for nada, they got all upset that we went out into the streets and protested.
They had told us that we should stand up to immoral unfair authority figures. They made it heroic to hold government accountable.
And it seems half the Westerns were about brave lawmen standing up to lynchmobs, and only shooting the guns out of the hands of bad guys, because both mob violence and unnecessary killing were wrong.
Then, once the mob had come to its senses and apologized and dispersed, once the bad guy had been led away, the marshall would go out on a picnic with the storekeeper's daughter, because the land had once more become a place of peace and beauty.
Today, half the shows are about how dangerous the world has become and how much we need the police to protect us against the horrors that lurk around every corner, and how often justice is frustrated and how just as soon as one psychopath is gunned down another three even more crazed and sadistic rapists and murderers pop up to take his place.
It promotes a worldview that makes it important to fingerprint our children the next time they have Safety Day at the mall, and take their DNA samples, so that, when the inevitable happens and they are dragged away to be raped and tortured and killed, why, then … well, it gets kind of unclear how the fingerprints help in that situation, but it is VERY important that everyone's personal data be collected and kept on record.
Don't worry. You'll be protected from the child molesters, and the psychopathic murderers and the terrorists and Big Foot and the space aliens.
Big Brother is watching, and listening, and he loves you.
* (Here's the whole story, for the curious. I couldn't get it to open in a separate window)
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