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Monday, November 29, 2004
So a couple days ago Giblets was at the mall elbowing some grandma in the throat to buy a plastic squeaky-toy cow (victory was Giblets's!) when Giblets noticed the TiVos, the great electronic beasts of the modern age which are slowly but surely killing off our beloved advertising-based culture.
When Giblets was just a little Giblets, he would watch television all day long, getting about six to eight hours of advertising a day. Those commercials weren't just mindless blurbs designed to pollute my brain with an irrational lust for SUVs and Vanilla Coke. They were my friends. Giblets spent weekday afternoons in McDonaldland, a magical world of imagination where everything is brightly-colored, friendly, surprisingly edible - and dripping with polyunsaturated fats! He sailed the ocean waves with Cap'n Crunch, who would regale Giblets day after day with his tales of the open sea and the deliciousness of his tangy Crunchberry cereal! But these commercials weren't just Giblets's friends. They were his role models. The Energizer Man taught Giblets the importance of strength and determination, while his lagomorphic mechanical counterpart taught him to stay the course and never give up no matter how many leading brands got in his way. And the Kool-Aid Man taught Giblets that no man-made boundaries can prevent us from answering the higher calling of Duty to the Good. Of Kool-Aid. They are the last pure innocents in the televisual wasteland, existing only to please us, to make us happy, to fill our lives with thousands of pounds of delightfully consumable goo. And what will happen to them, and all of Giblets's friends, if ad-blocking and ad-skipping technology spreads further and further? No one will watch them*, and they will all fade away. Cap'n Crunch will go out to sea one last time. Ronald McDonald will go the way of the good Mayor McCheese, assassinated by militant consumer rights advocates. And Giblets will be left all alone. Congress had a chance to stop this a couple weeks ago but they totally pussied out. Now it is up to Giblets - and you. All of us must join together and protect our advertising friends - our very culture - by looking to the children. Without our help the children might grow up in a world without the tender loving care of an omnipresent advertising-media complex. They might never know that the giant hamburger people will love them if they eat a value meal or that the talking duck wants them to buy insurance. Oh sure, they'll see advertising in some other places... in magazines, in newspapers, on websites, in email, on buses, on taxis, on the subway, on park benches, on billboards, before movies, during movies, in the theater while they're walking outta the movies, on restaurant menus, in bars, on mall kiosks, on the food they eat, downloaded into the chip implanted in the base of their neck... but it will not be enough. And it will not be the same. That's why Giblets is counting on you, the parents of tomorrow, to do the right thing and teach your children commercials - cause you can be damn sure the federal government won't do it for you in these public schools! Make sure they get well-rounded exposure, from lesbian-baiting beer ads to boring ISP ads to that one for Paxil with the burping frog. Don't do it for Giblets. Do it for the children, because they are the future. Let's make sure the future is as obsessed with buying tons of useless crap as the present. * Except for poor people. But who wants to sell stuff to poor people?
posted by Giblets at 5:55 PM
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