I only watch TV when spending time with my family, and usually it’s the cartoon network that my granddaughter watches, with my 18-month-old grandson watching periodically as he makes his creative rounds between the living room and the kitchen, occupying himself admirably, compared to his nine-year-old sister, who occasionally played a tune on her recorder between hours of episodes or during a rerun (Not that I’m ungrateful for her musical effort—it means a lot to me).
I got a larger dose of kid TV than normal this weekend, and here are some of my observations.
Cartoons no longer have the traditional order of events as they did in earlier TV generations. No good guys fighting bad guys, struggling to the very end, in which the good guys (Whew!) win. In fact, some of them don’t even seem to have a logical sequence of events, though I tried very hard to retrospectively organize what I had seen into a cogent whole. This occurs occasionally, not in every episode, as if it’s being snuck in over the analytical radar, encouraging one to swallow the nonsensical without question.
The themes have, of course, changed, which may be news only to a mediaphobe like me. I am a mediaphobe because I see no value in repeating the modern Promethean experience of allowing myself to be tied to a TV and having the TV vultures come and pick my brains out daily. And no, I don’t “need to know what’s going on in the world,” it is not Reality; it is only the reality that the liberal media would like me to believe.
The series, How to Train Your Dragon, had the following messages across two episodes:
One
1. Put idiots in charge with no good track record for making good decisions.
2. Stand aside while they make moronic, arbitrary rules and use other subjects to enforce them, leaving them to play while others do their work.
3. Obediently follow these and wait for them to wise up while their rule begins to destroy their surroundings.
4. Eureka! They come to their fool senses enough to see the need for cooperation and subject equality.
5. Instead of sovereignty, the subjects demand as a condition for their cooperation an equal for all parcel of land that each will own and decide over.
6. Since the idiots have no other choice, they agree, lest their kingdom burn to the ground, and a benign anarchy ensues with no further progress reports.
Two
1. There is an evil lurking and hunting on the island, endangering the latest occupants, and there is much dialogue and reflection on the morally right approach to stopping it.
2. One is to use underhanded means to bring down the enemy; just win, whatever it takes.
3. Two is to stand by, not meddling in the cycle of life; let nature take its course.
4. Three is to be true to who you are, if you are the honest type who has to be able to live with your own values and actions; these include personal responsibility for helping the oppressed.
5. Heartfelt courage and psychosocial understanding of the evil and its motives lead the honest, physically soft and rotund protagonist to take actions which are aligned with his values.
6. He is saved by a creature who loves him likewise and acts on those same shared values, so instead of dying the predictable death, he is spared by love and altruism.
7. The evil is transformed by understanding and love, and they all live happily ever after.
If you’ve been reading on this site for any appreciable amount of time, you won’t need me to point out the many logical fallacies found in the media brainwashing of children listed above, and you will understand when I use James’ specific reference to “the oppressed.”.
Other things noticed:
Boys may be replaced by girls in traditional stories involving physical prowess and crafty domination.
Indecision by female leadership with repeated efforts to understand an opponent’s actions in the best light, with no physical evidence upon which to base such understanding, whereby the male warrior’s pleas for permission to protect based on the physical evidence is a misreading of the opponent’s culture and character, and the indecisive female leader’s vacillation based on specious evidence is correct.
Creatures that are traditionally dangerous turn out to sing, knit, and drink tea, so don’t trust your own senses or survival intelligence (I shit you not).
It is o.k. to use deception to win the morally high ground (hint: it is always from a liberal value system), even if everywhere else, honest introspection is the rule.
Just talk to the bad guys, and they will see the error of their ways and make good decisions from here on. (Let’s start with Isis or an oppressive leader, shall we? Or how about one of the local oppressed, when they approach you with a suspicious hand in their pocket, mouthing a deceptive greeting?)
Anyway, you can see that my tendency to snidely insert my own application of these messages is just too hard for me to resist, so I’ll stop now. I think this is a good cross section of kids’ programming, coming from a kids’ network, which is supposed to be of good enough quality that the parents shouldn’t have to worry about what their child is absorbing while they leave them alone to watch. The kids’ commercials would be another essay, but I mostly ignored them. Suffice it to say that there is also moral brainwashing within.
As to what makes me confident enough to put out my interpretation as highly valid, if not True? I grew up without a TV, didn’t have one in my house until I was at least 29, and then only because I could allow chosen videos for viewing. My father felt the social influence of the TV was negative and a brain rotting use of time. Though I wished I could be more like other kids at the time and have a TV in my home (because fitting in was always an immigrant-child challenge for me), I can’t watch a program without seeing it very differently than a viewer-from-childhood would. For this, I am very grateful to my father.
Lili Hun
