Mama's House

I know it's been awhile since the last post. But there really isn't any family related news to post or at least I'm not privy to any, but if any of you do know what's going on with family or want to share anything that may interest the family, please do post. If not, you're going to have to suffer more and more of my non-family related posts like the one below.

I was watching NBC's Las Vegas - guilty pleasure of mine so don't judge - last night and I remarked to a friend how NBC's "Green Week" campaign was really annoying me to the point where I wanted to go out and hurt the earth. Don't get me wrong, I didn't aspire to nuke it or anything like that but more like go stomp on some flowers or leave an unnecessary light on. At the time I didn't know why it bothered me so much. I thought maybe it was that it turned my entertainment into a bully pulpit of sorts and the shows came off as being preachy in a sort of you must join our cult or suffer eternal damnation way. But that wasn't really it. So what was it? Well I think Jonah Goldberg explains it real well.

[Y]ou've seen the tyranny of Green even if you've never turned on NBC.

Green is everywhere. Every magazine feels compelled to do a special "green issue," but they feel so guilty about it, they ditch their glossy paper for pulp that gives it the feel of a hemp-commune newsletter that doubles as toilet paper. Food magazines have replaced "delicious" with "sustainable" as the highest praise....

Now, the predictable response to my caterwauling is that I just don't get it. Of course, Bob Costas' Dickensian studio lighting is just so much symbolism. But, they respond, NBC is "raising consciousness" and promoting "awareness."

We've heard this tone before, perhaps starting in high school, when we were told, "If we all work together, we can make this the best yearbook ever!"

And that's why, on top of all the other reasons, Green Week - and the Green Millennium it hopes to usher in - is so annoying. It plays us all for suckers.

First of all, you have enormously rich people at fantastically wealthy corporations seeking grace on the cheap with a few symbolic gestures that come at absolutely no cost and often-considerable profit....

Liberals and environmentalists love to whine about special breaks for corporations, and they work themselves into paroxysms of paranoia about how big corporations propagandize against action on climate change. The reality is exactly the opposite: GE, DuPont, British Petroleum and countless other big corporations routinely propagandize in the other direction, largely to win governmental support they don't need.

So that's what pissed me off so much. Not that it was more liberal bullshit being stuffed down my throat. But it was the fact that it basically turned the shows I was watching into thinly veiled commercials and boy do I hate commercials. It was like NBC was tricking me into watching a 3:00 am infomercial in primetime. How fucking lame is that?