Friday, June 8, 2007
Media and advertising
Here I go with Adbusters again but it's a great magazine. A college professor writes about her Critical Media Studies classroom and how she tries to get the point across of advertising and it's effects on our society. She finds a lot of resistance from what she calls her generation y-ers. Those born between 1977-1997. The way we grew up is impacting our view of advertising and media. She brings about an interesting perspective. Generation y is not phased by advertising and approaches it as unimportant because they feel it has no effect on society. They are what she calls the "me generation". I quote her "It's three years into their own Vietnman, and they aren't exactly flooding the streets with protestors. Often students tell me that they find politics to be boring and irrelevant to their own experiences." Why aren't their demonstrations in mass like they used to be? Are we really THAT generation, because to me it feels like it's getting worse. I look at kids today and wonder what is really important to them. What are we teaching them as a society? Naomi Rockers-Gladen's class said they felt the media has no effect on society and each person should be taught values by their parents. But it seems that society is only being shaped more and more by the media. It is shaping our youth, not in a good way. This article left me mad and almost feeling helpless about where we are headed and what the future looks like. Can we change? Is it too late? Will CNN for generation y'ers look like "Lindsay Lohan finally takes rehab seriously. We mean it this time" or "Britney Spears launches her 8th comeback tour" I can only say, I hope not!
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Oh, I don't know. In my frequently humbled opinion, young people don't get enough credit for being as aware as you-all are. Or maybe another way to put this is that we oldsters were nowhere near as counterculture as some of us like to put on. An awful lot of folks were "secretly against" the Vietnam War in deep retrospect, and a lot of people who look convincingly hippie in old photos were listening to Neal Diamond instead of Hendrix.
That's not to say the Civil Rights and antiwar movements weren't as big a deal as they're touted. Quite the opposite, in fact -- they're often criticized as ineffectual, and papers since released under the Freedom of Information Act have demonstrated that the marches had a lot more impact than almost anyone thought at the time.
But look at the time frame with respect to the Vietnam War. We'd played tag with involvement ever since the end of WWII, when we put the defeated Japanese governer back in charge of Vietnam instead of the popular (and yes, socialist or communist) Ho Chi Minh, the local leader. JFK commited troops in 1962; this was to back up a government supported by a collapsing French colonial presence. The "South Vietnamese" government had a lousy human rights record, but there was little or no protest. Some people have indicated that JFK had decided to pull away from involvement shortly before his death, but I have seen no evidence to believe that, and it would have been inconsistent with a lot of his other actions. LBJ escalated war sharply one time after another, but there was little significant talk about stopping the war in the public or the press before '67 for certain, and it gained little force until '68. A few things had happened at Berkeley and, if I recall, Columbia, but not that much. LBJ already knew (as since-released tapes have shown) that the war would not be won,yet government said nothing against war, and the public said little. "Too many of my friends are earning too much money," he said; a lot of us would have liked to have known. But we did not; even John Lennon was still singing about holding hands in the mid-60's.
Another point is that people were being drafted, and when the draft lottery started, upper-middle class and upperclass people were told to go to war. Sure, some people managed to pull strings; George W. Bush, for example, had a soft run in Texas when his test scores should have sent him to 'Nam. But a lot of people came home in body bags, and they weren't all Hispanic, Asian, African-American, or even poor or working-class. Most returning soldiers didn't talk much, but some of those few who did had some downright nasty things to say.
By contrast, large protests happened here and abroad before Iraq was even invaded. The US government has been forced to use a volunteer army (which some have criticized as a "poverty draft," since most soldiers come from working class or poor homes), a lot of mercenaries under Blackwater and the various contractors, and a difficult-to-estimate number of intelligence operatives. Billions of federal dollars that have disappeared have likely gone to difficult-to-classify operatives who are doing work and facing dangers that were faced by draftees in Vietnam.
I'm not sure just how bad this news will become economically, but it's not just working folk who are apt to lose money on this one.
The other day, when the Democratic Congress signed off on what had been largely a Republican war, a NY Times poll showed only 20% of Americans favored Bush's handling of the war, and about 3 times that many favored a pullout. Nixon's approval rating in '73, when the Watergate hearings were on TV every day, was 39%, almost double Bush's current ratings for the war.
In many ways, our situation reminds me of what I saw in about'67, leading up to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in '68. At the time, Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy (the elder, from a 2007 perspective) were moving into antiwar positions, while both the Republicans and the main part of the Democratic Party machine went on in support of the war.
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