Double Flee A

the "anti-drug"

I don't listen to commercial radio often, though sometimes when I'm on a bike, tiring, and am looking for some music to get over the next hill, I'll switch to the rock station and through good fortune am usually treated to (is "music" too euphemistic?) rather than commercials for whatever carbonated corn syrup is at the peak of its media blitz. This arrangement works for me.

Anyway, I'm sitting here doing my maybe-too-usual morning internet thing, taking a day (Totally allowed! It's a lab day, optional.) away from watchmaking school, and listening to a show I've never heard, the Jerry Springer radio show as I drink my lazy morning coffee in the sun-warmed mess I call a nook, when the commercials begin. And I am ok with the selsun blue ads, and even with the barfy car dealership ads in principle. They're trying to break through the noise and sell some product. That's what keeps the whole media machine lubricated.

But then I hear something different. It's about chaperoning your kids to a party where there aren't any adults, where there might be "drugs!" It's unclear whether the kid goes after the end, now that the dad has said 'If you're going I'm going then.' And it ends with the words "Parents. The Anti-drug."

[Expletive deleted] that.

Number one, no kids who would bring their parents to a party would be welcome at one, and they know that, so this is a scenario which would never, ever happen. This kid is (thanks, parents who think teenage social interaction pivots on narcotics) so socially backward that he wouldn't have anybody to do drugs with anyway and wouldn't know about the party even if it was next door. More likely, he's sniffing modeling glue in his room, listening to some horrid schlock-metal band, carving things on himself, and posting pictures of his bleeding torso to various message boards.

Second, that this ad could even run describes how disconnected people are from their children and how tuned in they are to the imaginary conscience of the media, invisible, ethereal, nonexistent. Are parents closer to the voice on the radio than to their own flesh and blood? Observe! "Be afraid of the drugs at the party your kid might go to." And thereby the pompous implication, "Without us making this commercial, you'd never even know about the drugs, the parties, your child's level of emotional adjustment in his/her world." And by not shutting the stupid radio off, changing the station, or wincing in displeasure at this snide animosity, whoever listens to this complacently conspires against his kid, and demonstrates that he is a person addicted to his own paranoia whose role in the family is sadly as it is described by the media, which is the problem anyway, the cop who can trust no one.

And finally the real complaint, the ridiculous, postmodernist propagandist term "Anti-drug." This is third-hand car salesman talk, and its sloganry is confusing for a reason, which is that, although they'd rather you didn't think about it, there is a product for sale in this radio spot. It's a little bit the paranoia, yes, but it's also the media's credibility on the subject of your family, and all sentient beings know that commercially or (worse?) governmentally-sponsored morality has no place in a family. In this ad and others like it, there's an influence going on, an influence that is mainly subconscious, which changes attitudes and perceptions we were formerly familiar and comfortable with. Sort of like drugs.

Drugs exist to alter people's experiences, and so does the media. When I was a kid they taught us in school (I wonder if they still do, what with pages in the textbooks devoted to advertisements) that the three functions of the media are to entertain, inform, and persuade. Nowadays, in postmodern America, a modernist agenda (consume, conform, obey) is behind the assault on the collective consciousness that is the supergroup "America", and even the function "inform" has been subsumed by corporations who own the media centers, to perform the action "persuade". So what's postmodern about this?

The mere idea that a media outlet can perform a public service in the first place is truly bizarre, yet it glides by in the stream of ones and zeroes, the digital phlegm, that describes, or frames, or even suspends, our postmodern experience, our collective gooey ennui. It's not that we don't care, we just can't afford to notice everything anymore. There's too fucking much of it and it smears together, all that information about cars and celebrities and families and disasters, and foods and economies and gas prices and concerts and opinions themselves, into a dreamlike, soupy glob. Think amnesia. The cannibalism of thought itself, in the hands of the powerful.

Ironically, the only thing that will perform the action advertised by the "anti-drug" commercial is the one that no one can advertise for, the one that no conventional message can adequately illustrate. As long as you are addressed by anyone, your role in that relationship is pre-fabricated. You're a receiver of information, and in our time and place, the avalanche of information we subject ourselves to is beyond my ability to apply simile toward. You're still absorbing right now, and I encourage you to stop immediately (after reading this, of course).

There's some buddhist thing I heard once that, it occurs to me, comes closest to short, sweet, and correct for tying this up neatly. I have to get to work.

In "kill your parents, kill your god, kill your teacher", teacher means this message itself. I like this little saying, even though I think there's another version with something about killing yourself which is even better.

Have a nice day.

posted by dale @ 11:48 AM