that frog girl

I ended up going down to DePaul tonight to see a documentary about the way the working class is depicted in entertainment television and popular culture. It was an interesting little film called Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.

The basic idea was that who we see on TV is highly influenced by the economic interests of advertisers who want to a) appeal to the middle class and all of their delicious purchasing power, and b) frame consumer items as important to attaining ‘the good life’. As a result, the majority of people on TV are middle class. The working class people we see are portrayed as stupid, lazy or apathetic (and frequently all three), creating the idea that it’s their own fault they’re barely getting by, and they just need to work harder.

There was a bit of discussion afterward. It led me to thinking about how public spaces, from the airwaves to the schools, have all been co-opted by economic interests. The airwaves are all public, and corporations have licenses to use them, with the understanding that they also have a duty to inform and serve the public. But the emphasis is clearly on entertainment and consumerism. Schools were founded with the principle that a free public education is a requirement of participation in a democracy. But few schools require civics courses, and anyone talking about education and the public schools (including Dear Leader, President Bush) justifies their existence by framing them as job preparation. Democracy itself is repackaged in the current era as consumer choice - it’s a free country, and that means getting to buy the toothpaste that fits your personality.

I’m not in favor of tearing the whole system down and going back to subsistence farming (I swear I feel like a crazy leftist commie some days, until I talk to real radical leftists and realize how out there they really are), but there is something very very wrong with this perspective. And I worry very deeply about how pervasive it is in our contemporary culture.