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Huey P. Long once observed that If Fascism came to
America, it would be on a program of Americanism.
With
all due respect to the Kingfish, he was dead wrong. If that
sort of overwhelming, oppressive government ever arrives,
it will be on a program of protecting the
children.
Almost every assault on American rights and liberties
results from some effort to protect the
children.
Are you innocent unless proven guilty? Not if you're
charged with child abuse, in which case government
agencies, operating in secrecy to protect the
children,
may arrange to destroy your career, your
family and your bank account.
Perhaps you naively believe that freedom of religion is guaranteed in this country. Not if various child-protectors determine a possible threat to children -- then they send in the tanks and tear gas.
Do you also think there's such a thing as freedom of speech? Maybe in some countries, but not this one, as is evidenced by recent congressional moves to censor computer networks and, last week, to force manufacturers to install automated censorship devices on television sets.
Once upon a time, there were these creatures called
parents,
and it was up to them, not the government,
to protect their children.
Some researchers believe that parents became nearly extinct sometime in the 1980s while attention was diverted to the northern spotted owl and the red-cockaded woodpecker.
Assaulted from the left as hierarchical and archaic perpetrators of an oppressive system, and from the right as possible sources of child contamination (some youths were honored by the President then for reporting their parents to the authorities) and as an unproductive distraction from the two-career enhancement of the gross domestic product, parents quietly faded from the American scene.
Their places were largely taken by day-care centers and Peruvian nannies, but as complications developed -- these methods were labor-intensive and thus produced unacceptable costs -- the demand grew for an automated child-maintenance system.
And so we have the television set with the V-chip. A few surviving parents might actually watch television with their children, thus managing the material to which their children are exposed, but the great masses would prefer to spend their evenings toiling away at work they brought home from the office, serene in the knowledge that the V-chip will insure that the juveniles in the household will not be exposed to inappropriate programming.
Once they start installing the V-chip, what comes next?
Perhaps this scenario. You've just heard the State of
the Union address from President Phil Gramm. And now, Rep.
Richard Gephardt with the minority-party response.
The screen goes blank and the set is silent as the V-chip kicks in. It seems that someone in Washington decided that the speech -- a plea to preserve unemployment benefits and Food Stamps -- might traumatize some children whose households could starve without those programs, and so it got a V rating.
Actually, that's not likely. Politicians mortgage their souls and the nation's future in order to raise campaign funds to buy television time, and they pass laws that insure their continued ability to appear on the tube -- they're not about to allow their own freedoms of speech to be restricted.
Perhaps I could like the V-chip, though, if it leads to an entire suite of automated TV-content-control devices.
TS-chip: Blanks out all broadcasts of Trash Sports, so that your children won't accidentally get hooked on American Gladiators, celebrity tug-of-war or skateboard championships.
CC-chip: Zaps all programming that honors or encourages
Conspicuous Consumption, such as Lifestyles of the Idle
Rich
(excepting any CSPAN coverage of the U.S. Senate,
of course) and Compulsive Shoppers Network.
Children
watch these programs and start badgering their parents to
buy yachts, islands and zirconium bracelets. Saying we
can't afford it
gets tedious, and the CC-chip would
eliminate much of the need for such arguments.
IM-chip: Eliminates those 30-minute InfoMercials. Do children benefit from exposure to half an hour of two Hollywood has-beens babbling about the glories of their home liposuction machines? Does anyone? Didn't America become a world power and a beacon unto mankind without informercials?
CT-chip: During my youth, we were exposed to unspeakable violence in Tom and Jerry cartoons. But when my kids were of the Saturday-morning-cartoon age, they watched peaceful Strawberry Shortcake. They also craved Strawberry Shortcake dolls, lunchboxes, purses, outfits, cereal -- that wholesome cartoon was not entertainment, it was an extended commercial for every imaginable Strawberry Shortcake spin-off.
Install the CT-chip, and your children will be protected from Cartoon Tie-ins that turn them into voracious little consumers of junk toys and junk food.
After pondering these possibilities, I feel better. I can live with the V-chip, providing we can buy some of these other chips. It isn't just violence that corrupts children in this country.
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