Why make children fend for themselves?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 22, 2025 – My personal identification is as a first wave victim of an undeclared campaign against reason, a.k.a. first-wave baby boomer. I was born a citizen into a household where radio was the tip of the marketer’s spear; it wouldn’t be overtaken by television until my parents would have had my undivided attention long enough to teach me the fundamentals of both clear reason and proper speech.
A side benefit is that I’ve always preferred music to TV, movies, or any other mode of entertainment and distraction. Sadly, almost everybody younger than me was born, not a free citizen, but a consumer captive to monetized media. As the British aristocrat Sir Mick Jagger put it when I was in the audience he aimed musical messages at:
When I’m watching my TV
And a man comes on and tells me
How white my shirts can be
But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke
The same cigarettes as me…
I remember the day I woke to find a TV set near the Christmas tree, alongside a toboggan long enough to hold me, my three sisters, and both my parents. That would’ve been the first or second year of Ike’s republican presidency, around the same time he ordered the federal bureaucracy to rescind a Truman-era rule that kept the sales pros of Madison Ave. from creating sales pitches designed to modify the behavior of children.
How commercial speech works
That is how digital marketing works, it subverts reason and makes people in the targeted audience feel they need whatever product is being sold – and they need it now! Whereas all children need to play with things, no child ever needed to play with Mister Potato Head, the first product sold to kids via TV.
Under the earlier democrat’s administration, a federal regulation stipulated that TV commercials must be addressed to adults, not children. The businessmen who had transformed a career soldier into a rookie politician, however, soon convinced him to let business police itself. They knew that would leave children to fend for themselves, because they knew TV to be the default baby sitter in the typical American household.
Today, the power to manipulate the federal bureaucracy has been sold to an emotionally unstable person from South Africa. For what amounts to pocket change for him, he has been allowed to erase and undo government of the people, by the people, and for the people of the United States of America.
Now rebranded to appear gender-neutral, Potato Head remains on the market seventy years later, while the presidency is occupied by Ike’s two-time, two-timing republican successor, a felon from Yonkers, NY. He resembles the child’s toy, especially as an avatar of reason. Would that he was even more like the first product sold by monetized media to kids – a spud with with many eyes but no tongue?
Lady Liberty on her knees
America has been brought to her knees by seventy-plus years of electronic programming, plain and simple. People vote and vote again because they believe what comes out of the mouth of TV, no matter how alien it is from from a reasonable analysis of what the American revolution was fought to establish, plus why and how that victory needs to be re-established.
All baby boomers can sing the jingle that sold a kabillion tons of cereal, K E double L O double G. Also drummed into us electronically was the locale of that company. We know it to be the same state whose governor was targeted for execution by members of POTUS 45’s private militia.
But he was sent back to the White house anyway, because more voters like the way he makes them feel than the other candidate did. Had they my luck and been instructed in the fundamentals of reason and speech, before being left to fend for themselves in the dog-eat-dog world of commercial consumption, a certain ex-New Yorker would be sporting a number way bigger than 47 on his jumpsuit today.
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