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They surround us, everywhere; life a fluid they pour wherever they can to pour ideas in our heads, to get us to spend our money, to spend our labor earning money to spend on things we don’t need at all. And! They’ve got a whole industry paying psychologists, conmen, manipulators, lawyers, writers and artists of all types, to manipulate your mind.
The corporations invent an image for themselves – pure illusion. Whatever sells the most the longest, is the genuine face of Coke, Nike, McDonald’s. Yet in their commercials, they express a wet dream fantasy of how they wish us consumers would desire their product. Fake consumers (actors) are paid to have fake conversations about how their dumb product is ultra amazing. Lately, the theme seems to be costumer frenzy for a product too amazing to be real.
Let’s start with an easy example: children’s cartoons. Children are frenzied most of their day to begin with. But those children’s cereals are the worst. Cereal itself was invented by Kellogg as a nerve depressent, to lessen the nerves and let the young adult break the habit to masturbate. Corn flakes was invented to be bland and boring. But you would not have guessed it from these commercials.
The coocoo for cocoa puffs presents a coocoo bird that desires like a cocaine fiend for his next fix of sugar laden cocoa flavored cereal (the kid doesn’t need this garbage at all of course) – such that the bird has no ambition, purpose, or life outside seeking this narcoticlike sugar cereal. And when he gets a bite, the bird explodes in manic revelry, like a saint in ecstasy, the angels dance on his tongue tip, and he is not only coocoo -- but stark raving. The chocolate tastes cheap by the way. Its gross. But the cartoon bird, voiced by some dumb actor, pretending to go crazy for this cereal, inspires the kids to go coocoo themselves, which means always and only, because kids don’t have money, that they must annoy their poor parents with demands for coocoo cereal.
One commercial I happened to see had the bird climb a high mountain to see a guru, seeking peace – through Buddhist meditation? – from his overwhelming obsession with coocoo puffs. The wise guru asks him “why do you seek to escape it? Enjoy the chocolatey goodness,” at which point he himself procures the narcotic cereal for the demonic bird, and the coocoo bird takes one bite and is manic as a comet.
All these children’s cereals are peopled by the same sort of nut cases: a “silly rabbit” whose overwhelming fixation in life is to eat “trix cereal,” which he is rebuffed in being a mere rabbit, when “trix (which rot your teeth and shock your insulin) are for kids.” As if a rabbit seeking his next trick wasn’t bad enough, the plot is even worse for the other cereals, including endlessly and mercilessly chasing down a lepracaun for his “magical” sugar chunks in a bowl, or in the case of sugar bear, the bear haunts, assaults, and robs his desired cereal from “granny” – elder abuse. All to get the sugar fix. In this way, the children are encouraged to exhibit the behavoir we would least like to see in them: gustatory mania.
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Perfection Is Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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