MTV’s Virulent Spread
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MTV’s Virulent Spread
I am convinced that metastasis is at fault for the demise of the quality of our culture.
To explain, let me refer to the source of all evil, MTV.
While I am the first to admit that my guilty pleasures include RealWorld/RoadRules challenges and the occasional Video Music Awards ceremony, I am also the first to say that I think this network is about as banal as rubbish gets.
It promotes the sort of loosey-goosey, laissez-faire, I hate my parents, check out my six pack, I’m a twelve-year-old girl and I give blowjobs lifestyle that is degrading our culture by the minute.
It also instills a jaded sense of values within kids at very impressionable and formative stages of their development (which is, incidentally, a great part of its genius). MTV (speaking of it collectively is weird, and also sort of generalizes it and pigeonholes it as some mean-spirited entity, but nevertheless…) has figured out that its audience consists primarily of younger teenagers and that by telling these kids what to watch, it can reify its own status as a sort of pop-culture authority. In so doing, it solidifies its stance as the voice of the generation and empowers itself over and over and over again, in fact, every single time a teenager tunes into the station as is subjected to its advertisements and inane shows.
To its credit, the whole plan is genius. You show kids what they should be aspiring to by establishing these icons of pop culture (icons with erudite and meaningful names like “50-Cent” and “Chingy”) and demonstrate to them what they must have (iPods, clothes, etc.), thereby single-handedly generating an entire consumer movement around your own will.
What saddens and disturbs me, however, is that the power MTV wields could be used for incredible good. If it were telling kids to be moral and upstanding, if it provided examples and reinforcement of credible role models, people with humility and excellent values, perhaps we could teach an entire generation that being a good, humble, God-fearing citizen is the cool thing to do.
Unfortunately, this would probably all but kill the consumer bug that is infecting their young market right now. And that just wouldn’t be economically beneficial to a company that is generating benjamins by the billions.
My ultimate thesis is that MTV’s metastasis within our culture is at fault for the ruinous state we are in. The corrupt, abhorrent value system which the network operates upon and promotes has hit the bloodstream of society running, and is multiplying and corroding each and every upstanding citizen and each and every noble value that is left.
As a result, we have an infection that has run rampant and that may be irreversible. There is no penicilin injection that we can fire into the butt-cheek of our nation or world that will erradicate the damage that has been done. There is no moral antibiotic that will provide a quick heal.
The only thing we can hope for is that the infection kills off every host unable to handle the stress of the disease, and a sort of Social Darwinism takes root and leaves us (well down the road, mind you) with a new, morally resilient and value-strong society.
But this is a pipe dream, I’m afraid, and in the meantime, those of us that have yet to be infected probably already have, and just don’t know it.
After all, why do I even know who Beavis and Butthead, Puck, and K-Fed are, if I’m so resistant to the trends?
Because my morbid curiosity gets the better of me, that’s why.
