The shuffle like zombies

Remember when you where a little kid spending a week at your grandmas house? Remember how you'd make trips to the candy store and by all those cheap little toy guns with the police badges? Remember how you'd hide under the dining room table and grab the leg of an unexpectent grandparent? Remember how they'd shreak in a moments terror? I do.

Remember when you got your driver licence for the first time? Remember your first time on the freeway? Remember the cars wizzing about you as you gripped the wheel in white-knuckled terror? Remember when you ran that red light? Remember that brown Caravan that you didn't see? Remember explaining to your father why the car's passanger side door won't open? Remember how high his voice went? Thankfuly, I don't.

Now take both those voices and freeze them in their apogee. Now synthisize them together into a long, nail-to-blackboard screach. Now imagine if that screach could be manipulated to speak words, but communicate only in cleque ("Darmok, at tanaka", for you Trekkers).

Now imagine if this evil devil voice was given a reched, deformed body; a body that mocked everything human in form. Now clone this beast a hundred times, and record it's every move as it interacts with other beasts. You'd see them behaving in the most mocking manner. They would try to be funny by disrespecting all authority figures, violating taboos, and taking body functions out of context. Any respecting human would burn such footage, but alas, someone has put it on television, interspersed with five minute brain-washing sessions, nonetheless.

Welcome to the American Cartoon.

I guess it is unfair to treat any childrens cartoon as I would more "mature" things, but lets put it into perspective. Even if you don't find the animation and voices anoining, you still have this little thing called CONTENT. It's why we don't let 10-year-olds play Grand Theft Auto, it's why we don't allow those under 17 to enter an R movie. Now, cartoons my not have blood, cursing, or sex, but that doesn't mean their harmless (or, to better phrase it, "having any worth").

Cartoons are the junk food of television, and few would dissagree. The humor consists only of fart jokes and "look how dumb my parents are". Then the commercials start, shoving materialism into the empty brains of the youth.

The effects of all this can be clearly observed on any child who enjoys watch these shows on a regular basis; slacked jaws, blank stare, glazed-over look; the same symptems of the hypnotic state of mind (I'm NOT making that up! Modern cimetography is designed to keep the view as passive as possible). They don't even laugh ( I don't blame them).

Yes, I'm jaded when it come to this. I was told that the attitudes depicted in anyshow but sesame street were not acceptable. As a result, I find almost anything on television unwatchable, and I prefer mediums that arn't so satureated with materialism and pop-culture. But things are differen't with my brother, who lives in front of out TV, literaly. He eats and sleeps there, making the TV and two game systems unavilable until he desides to watch TV in his room (another sin, I was told).

And what does he watch? Cartoons, those bloody cartoons, blaring all day long. Like junk food, a handful of chips once in a while is fine, but eat them all day, every day, and you develop problems.

Now, what do the children who have been force-fed pop-culture watch when cartoons are too uncool for them? MTV. Now, what was once something to keep johny occupide now is a "lifestyle choice." But MTV and the 80's culture is a whole different rant for a later day.