" Stop teaching your girls about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, and The Hunger Games in an effort to liberate them. "
Children don't recognize The Hunger Games as social commentary, because of the plethora of glorified battle sequences. |
by Franc1NE, this image is represen tative of the cosplay surrounding The Hunger Games. |
A Debate with a Welfare Libertarian (Mainstream Democrat from Gen X)
Gen X: I'm not going to censor my child's entertainment.
Me: It's not censorship. Censorship is when you remove something that you deem to be bad for society. Simply being conscious about the material that you procure for your child isn't censorship. It's citizenship.
Gen X: I don't decide for my child what he should read, watch, or listen to.
Me: If you don't, then multinational corporations will, and they've spent trillions of dollars over decades figuring out how to get your child to do exactly what they want him to do.
Gen X: Art is too important for me to foist my opinions on my child.
Me: When you procure The Hunger Games, or bondage child pornography for your child, you are indoctrinating them with your opinion of what is art by making an affirmative gesture to support it.
Gen X: Oh, calm down. It's just some fluffy entertainment. It's not bondage child pornography. It's The Hunger Games, a book written for children.
Me: But I'm arguing that justifying violence in our society is what leads to things like domestic abuse, rape, many assaults and murders, as well as inexcusable military actions and racist policing policies. The Hunger Games is an exercise in justifying violence, so it could be a root cause of these problems.
Gen X: So, you're saying I shouldn't let my child see The Hunger Games.
Me: No. I'm saying if your child isn't able to grasp the irony of violent entertainment as critique of violent entertainment, they aren't ready to understand the Hunger Games as anything more than propaganda for the military industrial complex.
Gen X: I'm not going to censor my children's entertainment.
Eye roll provided by Buster Keaton. |
Addicted to Entertainment
Why is this so frustrating that I turn into Buster Keaton even thinking about it? Gen X never debates on the merits of the argument because they are too busy fighting the hypothetical. I am inclined to say that is because they know I'm right, but that would be unfair. They can't know that I'm right because they can't even get to the point where they are considering the idea that militaristic media contributes to social problems. The noteworthy thing is that their response is so remarkably similar to the response of addicts when they are confronted with facts that disrupt their addictions. It's kinda like the hysterical Portlandia sketch below.
Unrecognized Contradictions: They argue that films are important pieces of art, but the very notion that films or sports they like may be making society worse leads them to spasms of "Calm down, it's just entertainment." Which is it? The same way that an addict can hold two contradictory reasons in their heads for why they take drugs (I am overworked and bored), Gen X has no problem arguing that The Hunger Games is an important social critique and a fluffy action film.
Denial: The whole point is to get social critics to stop criticizing the entertainment that Gen X enjoys. Sometimes, the braver welfare libertarian will debate the merits of media culture for a few sentences, but inevitably they revert back to the circular logic, contradictions, and tactics designed to shut the argument down. Several Gen Xers have admitted that they were not willing to come along with me on my critique, because they didn't want me to spoil the fun, which is hysterical because I find it more fun to critique the media than to passively experience it.
It's not just a river, it's De-Nile. Get it? |
A friend introduced me to the idea that people are so resistant to these critiques because they are addicted to entertainment. So, I read several versions of the mass entertainment addiction theory, which seems to have originated in Christian theology, but is now being adopted by social psychologists.
I haven't done enough reading yet, nor thought about it enough to conclude for certain that society is addicted to entertainment. However, with the availability of corporate commercialism at our fingertips 90% of the time on our computer/phones, and hundreds of cable channels beamed into our home at any given moment, it seems like the seeds of an opium-war-style societal addiction have been laid. If that is truly the case, it is more important than ever to be conscious about the entertainment that we provide for our children. And no, that is not censorship.
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