40 is the New 14

What age do most adult Americans seem to act?

That is, when they’re not playing with their Wii, gobbling down comfort foods, throwing tantrums at Town Halls, entranced with the fairy tale lives of celebrities, adopting the latest “cool” fad, going to Dave and Busters (the adult Chucky Cheese’s), watching movies based on toys and calling their home their “crib”.

And let’s not forget the most effective marketing “toy” to entrance and attract the stares and drools of consumers, to get them roaming through malls like in “Day of the Living Dead”…sex. The media, commercials, etc. are flooded with promotions of sex, it’s used to sell shampoo (with moans of ecstasy), cars, beer and even directly to make Viagra the unnecessary drug of choice for insecure Baby Boomer men.

The infantalization or at least adolescentization of the American public has been a goal for the corporate interests that have been usurping our democracy for two main reasons.

1. Children are naturally egocentric and self-indulgent.

This is not a bad thing, for children that is, it is natural and a starting point for emotional development. A starting point, not a place to reside in for the rest of one’s life, building a mega mansion on it one can’t afford and having a family one doesn’t have the time, wisdom or resources to raise properly.

The corporate message has been to convince the public, “Hey Sport, you like that car? It’ll get you laid, make you wittier and enlarge your penis! Honest! Just get it! You can have it all!”

This is very convenient for the corporate world because people become Matrix-like batteries, drained of all their assets while restrained their whole lives by the credit card and mortgage debts they must spend their lives servicing.

How many people do you know who don’t owe on a credit card and haven’t been paying on one the majority of their adult lives? How many people do you know who believe that they will have all of their credit card debt paid off this year? Or next year? Or any year? And no fair counting the people who merely consolidate their debt by paying off credit cards with home equity loans, that’s still indebtedness for the same amount (then what often happens is credit card debt is rebuilt).

We have come to take for granted that part of life in society is being in debt one’s whole life and paying towards that debt one’s whole life. Isn’t something wrong with that? Do we really need all the “things” we are encouraged to become indebted over? I mean, how often are you using that Thighmaster or that George Foreman grill nowadays?

America has become crippled because of the sophistication of market research. Corporations have invested mountains of money dissecting why people decide to like things, how to make them like things and in the big picture, how to condition them through repetitive and omnipresent marketing, to be the most addicted consumers they can be.

In other words…convince and encourage adults to regress into being kids in a candy store with little self restraint, grabbing everything off the shelves that looks yummy. As long as the majority of this society remains in such a mindset, which unfortunately is continuing despite the recession, we are only being human batteries that provide greater and greater power to the  Matrix of the dominant corporate machine out there.

2. Children are easy to manipulate, control and dominate.

If you condition a dog to jump when you say “jump”, when anyone says “jump”, the dog jumps. Even if it’s at the edge of a cliff.

By the corporate community surrounding the public with media that conditions them to be “good consumers” (ie. being easy to manipulate into giving corporations their money for things they don’t need), the public has been wired to gobble up instructions, desires and “facts” from the media without fully processing all of it.

Thus, the other key agenda is achieved, a pliable public that can be “sold” on what corporate interests are also marketing in the political world to benefit themselves. Iraq war anyone? How about Death Panels? Perhaps I can get you a socialist-marxist-Kenyan-antichrist-Hitler-president appetizer plate?

Poor people who live in run down trailers were furious that the “Death Tax” (The Estate Tax) would only allow the first $3 million of assets to be untaxed.

Married couples were furious that gays getting married would destroy their marriages (they may have had a point in Larry Craig’s case). Yes, the same married couples of which over 50% will get divorced…destroying their own marriages with no assist from gay couples. This, not to mention how many of these “family values” people cheat on their wives and husbands, right Gov Sanford and Sen. Ensign and…well…I could go on and on.

And poor people without health insurance along with elderly people on Medicare…fiercely opposing the government providing health care for Americans.

Point being, so many people are so conditioned and child-like in their inability to use critical thinking, reasoning out conclusions for themselves from information they receive instead of simply swallowing whole POVs that come from a source they see as authoritative, that they frequently speak and vote against their own interests.

Some propose that the government’s neglect of education funding, more under Republican administrations (remember, No Child Left Behind was an unfunded mandate that drained time, money and resources from teaching kids various subjects to training them to pass the test) fits hand and glove with this agenda. An uneducated population is easier to dominate than one that has learned enough to know better.

This is a social tar pit, very hard to extract our society from it and the more some of us struggle to do so, the deeper the corporate interests seem to pull us down. As is in the news today, the banks that were too big to fail that destroyed our economy…are now bigger and have a greater monopoly.

So I have one message to all the “good consumers” out there of merchandise and political opinions, if they can put down their McDonald’s Flabby Meals, “Transformers Meet Tickle Me Elmo” DVDs and Rush Limbaugh inflatable dolls for a moment…

…GROW THE FUCK UP!