Liberal Debutante

Flash advertising is used to summon our emotions, in a 15
second commercial you’re told what you want by making it appeal to you very
basic wants in life. Advertising tells us how to think in addition to what we
want and why we want it. How? Easy. A diamond is advertised as ‘forever’. Who
wants a marriage or a love that lasts any shorter than forever? No one. Through
ploys like this advertising has given us what we want. Or at least what we
think we want.

When you ask someone what they crave out of life, it’s not
uncommon to get a response like “family” “love” etc. rather than “a really
great diamond”. So how is it that we go from love and family to diamonds and
beer? Ads show us ‘the good life’, they play up on what we desire. Beer ads demonstrated
the fantasy of a man and connect with the eroticism that is looming within.
Food ads show us good health and family times. Investment ads portray lovely
long happy lives ending in Hawaii.

They’re grasping on our inner desires and rechanneling these feelings from the
target audiences. Ads are how people are dreaming, they’re taking up our
emotions and selling them right back to us. Instead of focusing on that love,
that family and that happiness we’re focusing on an illusionary vision of what
we need to have in order to have the perfect and accepted love, family and
happiness.

In a way I’ve always seen advertising as exceedingly
comparable to religion. It sets up a false goal in order to control as many
people as possible. Through false themes and stories it invokes psychological,
social and physical ideals in people’s minds that they feel like they have to
follow. It is the ‘object’ world, or the ‘distant’ world interacting and
influencing the human world at the most basic and fundamental level. These
magical feats of enchantment and transformation bring instant ‘happiness’ and ‘gratification’.
It’s a passport to the surreal, and easy out to saying you’re happy and content
with life.

Just like with Christianity, you can say you’re living your
life to its fullest if you are living that life in regards to Jesus Christ, it
is the same with advertising. A lot of people would say that they’re living
their life to the fullest and greatest potential when they are the most happy –
but this happiness is streamed from false resources, just as Jesus is.

But for some reason no one ever stops to look at the imagery
in advertising and at the horrible effects it’s having on extremely important
aspects of life. The most obvious one is gender identity. Ads show men and
women, and as time progresses they are showing men and women in more explicit
and erotic ways. They don’t show how each person thinks in the ad, the man or
the woman is not an individual they are the standard for their gender and they
are portrayed and presented as how we think they think.  And don’t even get me started on how
incredibly disgusting and wrong some of the sexuality can be in advertising and
the complete objectification of women…. I’ll be going on for days.

Another issue with advertising and its flashy emotion
invoking ways can be phrased into one question: In 1988, would George Bush have
won the election with out ad campaigns? Politics are directly affected by advertising;
we see that a lot now, a ton of money has to go into political party campaigns
just to cover advertising costs. But what do the ads really say about them?
They just appeal to emotions that are already in us through one or two really ‘radically
based’ political stances. You don’t get the full picture – you get a false
representation of what is supposedly going to make you happy and solve all your
country’s problems.

Our younger generations are being hurt so badly by these ads
too. No longer are kids seeing toys that help them to experience life, be
curious and inventive, instead they are seeing toys in which they can play out
a fantasy world that they see on TV or in movies. For example, when I was a
little girl I played with toilet paper rolls. Yes, toilet paper rolls. I don’t know
where I got the idea, but I would collect all the toilet paper rolls in the
house, and I would draw faces on them, make houses out of them and I would
really use my imagination to play. But now, you can just go out and buy a Lilo
and Stitch doll and play out the entire movie. There is no more imagination in
play time, no time to grow and develop the child’s own mind. When I worked at a
day care there were 2 year olds on the computer for over ½ an hour. …I couldn’t
believe it.

What I think is the worst kind of advertising today is that
crap that gets thrown into music videos. Nelly wrote an entire song that was an
advertisement; I’m of course talking about his song “Air Force Ones”… a song
about shoes that became insanely popular after the release of his song. This
just ruins music. I think it is a Missy Elliot video, (I think…) where you
watch part of the video through a Nokia phone. When I think back to New Kids on
the Block, or Vanilla Ice there was nothing they were selling, they didn’t want
you to go out and dress like them or get ‘grills’. It was about their music.
(Alright stop. Collaborate and listen, Ice is back with my brand new invention.
Something grabs a hold of me tightly flow like a harpoon daily and nightly…….yes,
I know the entire rap by memory, and will continue it after the fold… mwa ha
ha. You should hear me rap it!)

It’s one of those things that so many of us know are
horrible for our society. The earth literally can not stand to have these
consumer driven populations anymore – but there is no stopping it. The false
reality, advertising acting as god, is too satisfying for people, so we live
with one more idiocy of the world that is just going to help us in our
inevitable self destruction.

Will it ever stop yo, I don’t know. Turn off the lights and
I’ll glow.
To the extreme I rock a mic like vandal light up a stage and
wax a chum like a candle.

Dance.

Go rush to the speaker that booms I’m killing your brain
like a poisonous mushroom

Deadly.

When I play a dope melody anything less than the best is
felony.
Love it or leave it you better gain weight. You better hit
bull’s eye the kid don’t play.
If there was a problem yo I’ll solve it, check out the hook
while my DJ revolves it.

Okay, I just remembered how long the song actually is. You’ll
have to just trust me that I know it off by heart. I will do my favourite part
though:

Girls were hot wearing less than bikinis. Rockman lovers
driving Lamborghinis. Jealous ‘cause I’m out getting mine. Shay with a gauge
and Vanilla with a nine. Reading for the chumps on the wall. The chumps acting
ill because they’re so full of eight balls. Gunshot rang out like a bell. I
grabbed my nine all I heard were shells falling, on the concrete real fast,
jumped in my car slammed on the gas. Bumper to bumper the avenue’s packed, I’m
trying to get away before the jackers jack. Police on the scene you know what I
mean. They passed me up confronted all the dope fiends.