Are You Raising a Douchebag?
July 25th, 2011Via: Details:
Let us begin with the assumption that if you are a parent, you wish for your child every advantage and opportunity. From the ergonomic high chair to that all-important first sushi experience and beyond, life should be as golden for your little one as it is for, say, Pax Jolie-Pitt.
But inevitably the moment arrives when all your doting and care come back on you in the form of a precocious little barb that reminds you in no uncertain terms of . . . you. It might be that his friend Jake’s eighth-birthday party was “unbelievably lame” or that “it’s weird that Brandon’s family flies first-class and we don’t,” or maybe it’s simply that “these taquitos taste like turd.”
It’s then that you must reckon with the real possibility that your drive to make little Johnny better, smarter, and hipper has merely turned him into a douchebag. Put it this way: If it’s your child, not you, who gets to choose your weekend brunch spot, or if he’s the one asking how the branzino is prepared, it’s probably time to take a hard look at your own behavior.
“…For $1,200 a day, Pieters will help parents tame their brats…”
This pull quote says everything we need to know about who the editor(s) wanted the article written for, that is, the target markets for Details magazine are clearly upscale urban parents — or those who aspire to emulate them.
Mostly, children tend to “reflect” their parents until external socialization, aka peer pressure, accelerates the natural individuation process. As their individual nature interacts with the nurturing (or not so nurturing) patterns of the adults and eventually other children in their lives, their character takes on its basic shape. Their own level of desire for acceptance, internalized in early development, expands outward into their social network, driving their interactions with others.
Of course, in cultures that deify individuality and power, even as they pay lip service to the health of “mass society” in the media, the mixed signals emanating from articles like this only reinforce the intellectually damaged views it purports to examine. Just beneath the snarky, snazzily-crafted surface, it conflates in a very shallow manner an otherwise intensely complicated subject, i.e.: human development, with the larger problem of consumer culture. Without once mentioning the word “advertising”, for example.
However, all those advertisers paying the bills aren’t going to be terribly happy about such sentiments running directly alongside their wares in the magazine, now are they?
Having worked inside the editorial industry, I can confidently state that all the integrity in the world on the part of an editorial staff will NEVER trump the will of the advertisers. Never. The words pay for the ads. Simple as that. Not one word you ingest from any media publication goes to print without the tacit approval of the paymasters. Yes, there are layers of subtlety in the whole charade, and they are largely subterfuge.
So, getting to the point:
EVERYTHING you read from the “mainstream” media, or ANY outlet with a business model based on ad money is already BOUGHT & PAID FOR. At some level or another it is ALL “programming”, that is, advertising.
“You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don’t need you
Don’t go for help… no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold…”
Talented musician, composer, child of the MIC and MK handler extraordinaire Frank Zappa wrote these revealing words in 1973, in reference to television. The scary truth contained therein applies up and down the media spectrum, visual media simply being the most powerful and therefore pernicious of them all.
CORRECTION
Typed: “The words pay for the ads.”
When the corollary opposite — “the ads pay for the words” — is obviously all too true and what was intended for that sentence in the first place.
Typing fast while only a couple sips into the first cuppa will do that to you. C’est la vie… =)
Somehow we need more publications in the style of Consumer Reports magazine – no advertisers allowed, and therefore no punches pulled. Of course these would be much more expensive due to no funding by advertisers, but that would be the cost of the truth.
Except that Consumer Reports, for all the high-falutin’ pseudo-scientific impartiality cred, has long since been outed as pay-to-play as well.
They’re just a little more surreptitious about how they play the funding game.
It was their whole PR campaign against the tippy little Suzuki Samurai back in the day that provided the coup de grace to their credibility. As I recall, when the complete set of test stats were leaked, the Ford Bronco II actually had worse rollover stats, a fact which SOMEHOW went completely missing in the published “report”.
The fallacy of Consumer Reports “impartiality” is an illusion on par with the myth of “balanced journalism”. Neither actually exist, but because so many “experts” declare it so with such collective force, it’s hard to think otherwise from within the larger media-mediated echo chamber that is “modern” society.
All words are lies.