By Dave Read, Nov. 15, 2023 – Our reaction to Taylor Swift is as perilous to society as is our reaction to Donald Trump. It demonstrates a widespread hunger, an insatiable appetite to adopt a packaged identity – to graft onto something greater than ourselves. (Can you even graft onto a grifter?)
Our fraternal twins, Swiftie and MAGA, act as if they do not know the sublime nature of the individual. They seek refuge in ad hoc congregations of fellow seekers. Concerts and rallies become cloning exercises, where they assume religious-ey identity, around someone they imagine to be worthy of worship.
History is rife with antecedents to the MAGA mistake; Donald is a dime-store version of Mussolini and Hitler. Swifties descend from the original Dylan Freaks, who would have become as scary as Swifties, if he hadn’t left the road and detoured into the Hudson Valley in 1966.
By then, Dylan had realised that the popular media has no more interest in the truth than a dollar bill does, and so he never again engages them, except when he has an album, merch, or tickets to sell.
Mashed spuds with gravy again
Trump’s resemblance to Mr. Potato Head, whether in external appearance or internal character, is either serendipity, or proof that coincidence merely is how the creator maintains her anonymity.
Mr. Potato Head headlines this piece because it is the first commercial product sold over the public airways straight to children. Barbie followed soon thereafter and makes this missive’s title appear fair and balanced!
Without use of the public airwaves to sell stuff, television never gets off the ground, much less into every household that welcomes it into the family. Because airwaves are public property, their use by private and commercial interests must be strictly regulated, to protect the interests of the people. That is the essence of a republic – government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation could never get off the ground in America, could it? For all intents and purposes, that is precisely what happened in 1952, when an FTC regulation was loosened to allow televised sales pitches to be aimed at kids, instead of being addressed to parents, or other responsible adults.
An ad for Mr. Potato Head is the first example of TV programming designed to made kids nag their parents. It/he/she is still on the market, even as the animated counterpart again rolls toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Welcome to the consumer economy, which is another way of saying welcome to the wasteland, because waste is the inevitable product of consumption. The Swiftie and the MAGA are the result of the erosion of parental authority, in the aftermath of electronic media becoming the most attractive and most consistent voice in the typical American household.
Mothers and fathers no longer rule families like queens and kings, as they had done before TV. Some may be able to regulate how much mass media their child consumes while in their presence, but how many are able to protect against the psychological tricks found in TV commercials on the living room wall, or in the ads wedged between the videos and reels that animate devices held in the palm of every child’s hand?
Since the sellers of things know which demographics are easiest to monetize, they make sure to design programming to make the targeted consumer feel like a queen or a king. Scholars call the phenomenon “manufacturing consent.”
Having snipped the connection that made parents the default heroes in the minds of their children, consumers of mass media today are left in a permanent state of adolescence, reluctant to emancipate themselves, to leave the nest and become the heroes of their own lives.
Independent, responsible adults know better than to believe people who lie, they know better than to put their faith in someone who has paid $25 million to settle a fraud charge, they know better than to entrust the business of the nation to someone who already has bankrupted six businesses – including a casino!
Nor do healthy, well-adjusted people behave like Swifties, or like pro sports fanatics, whose hunger to belong leads them to spend more money on tickets and team merch than they spend on their children’s education. They get hoarse rooting for teams of millionaires, instead of by reading bedtime stories to their kids.