So you’re a right-minded, vigilant parent. So what?
Short of blindfolding, ear-plugging and chaining your kids to the pipes in the basement, you’ve got no shot. You can’t reasonably protect them from what TV clearly, systemically and relentlessly has in mind for them: To push them to become remorseless, coarse, mean-spirited wise guys.
“Kids being kids” has never included more mindless, strident acts of menace, mayhem and even felonious crime. Heck, a 17-year-old on L.I., last month, having lost a Rated V-for-violence video game, just for comical revenge “swatted” – pranked emergency services; it’s a fad (and what fun!) – by “Skyping” that he’d just killed his mother and he was just getting started.
Kids being kids, in this case, put police in scramble mode; a helicopter and 60 cops, weapons drawn, responded. Kids being kids, lately, too often leaves, as they say on TV, “Three dead and scores wounded, many of them seriously.”
To think that pulling a fire alarm used to be the worst of kids-will-be-kids “pranks.”
Dutifully, all the TV news stations, with a “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” reported the story. But soon to follow on their station or network was more programming and commercial messages designed to seed, stimulate or prompt the newest-low wise guy in kids.
And the most impressionable and vulnerable – and what kid isn’t at least a bit of both? – will scratch their itch.
Here’s a two-parter: 1) Would the Major League Baseball Network on a Sunday morning nourish the wise guy in your kid? 2) Is polio funny, or what?
Last Sunday morning MLBN’s “Quick Pitch” highlights show included a commercial for a new razors and blades company. “Mike,” the attitude-enriched young wise guy who stars in the ad, early on states “Our blades are f—–g great!”
Yep, it’s not TV, anymore, without bleeps. Scripting expletives that need to be bleeped has become requisite; it adheres to TV’s formula that there’s nothing more appropriate than the inappropriate.
Next, Mike tells us that razors and blades have become more fancy than functional – agreed – then smugly added, “Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade – and polio.”
I suppose it should be written here that I’m serious.
On the other side of Sunday, live what once were called “family viewing hours.” Early Sunday nights were when “Walt Disney Presents” appeared on ABC.
Now? Well, now the Disney-owned ABC presents the sweetly titled “America’s Funniest Videos.” And it used to be. Now? It’s loaded with wise guy junk:
A skateboarder landing, spine-first, at the bottom of cement steps. A likely drunken teen jumping off the roof of a house and into a swimming pool. Oops, he just missed! A rider being violently thrown, head-first, from a horse. A snow skier losing control and smashing into a tree, a water skier smashing into a dock.
And it’s all attached to a laugh track! Got it? It’s funny! You’re supposed to laugh your bleepin’ bleep off, then submit your own stunts! Winners get a trip to DisneyWorld! No matter if someone’s injured, that’ll be lost to the sounds of an entire audience laughing! Close-ups will be edited in of folks in the audience throwing their heads back, laughing!
The U.S. entertainment industry now specializes in mass-producing young, no-upside wise guys and worse. Sundays, too. As if kids need extra help, from adults, no less.
And as called-to-the-scene police detectives will tell you, “There’s no such thing as a coincidence.”
For those unsure as to what Federal Communications Commission appointees do all day, well, same here.
Last Sunday, the Spike TV network again aired a Kevin Trudeau get-rich-quick infomercial. Trudeau commercials have appeared on Spike every Sunday since he was sentenced, two months ago, to 10 years in prison for fraud.
Is Spike aware of this? Yes. Does it care? Obviously not. Neither, apparently, does TV’s legal guardian, the FCC.