agitprop version 2.0

Attention Hummer Owners!

Do not despair that your gas-guzzling, military-style suburban combat vehicles are hazards to both the environment and the personal safety of other drivers. I have found the cure for your Hummer-induced cognitive dissonance.

Display your pride for environmental destruction by flaunting your officially licensed Hummer Merchandise! There are caps, jackets, mugs . . . and even a portable Hummer barbecue! Imagine how good steaks would taste imbued with the right about of Hummer hickory flavor! Mmm.

Now I understand that you behemoth substitute penis captains believe the Hummer is a status symbol of power (or a psychological compensation device for your small wang). I bet you miss your Hummer when you're not driving. Well, H2 fragrance allows you to flaunt this status symbol all day long--it's only $20 per ounce and it is "sexy, deep and urban". Yeah baby, grrr!

I love the smell of H2 in the morning, smells like . . . global warming!

Hotcakes For Christ

Rise and shine! It's a beautiful Saturday morning and I'm going to start my day out with some of Pat Robertson's delicious Age-Defying Protein Pancakes:

America loves pancakes! Pancake houses across the country are packed. But what are those syrup drenched, hot cakes doing to our bodies? Putting us on a fast track to weight gain, high cholesterol and adult onset diabetes.

But now there is hope for everyone who loves this early morning treat. Pat's very own Age-Defying Protein Pancakes! These delicious pancakes give you energy, help your heart and provide a substantial boost of muscle-building protein.

He is also selling an age-defying shake and age-defying anti-oxidants from his Christian Broadcasting Network. By trying to defy age, Pat is clearly trying to defy God. Moreover, there's no ethical conflict of interest in selling products off your nonprofit organization's website, right Pat?

Flip some flapjacks for Jesus. If you're lucky you might get one like this:

         

Then you can sell it on Ebay for $10,000. After all, Jesus was crucified so that millionaires could make more millions off his namesake.

What Would Jesus Eat?

Agitprop is dedicated to uncovering the modern Jesus. Christians live by the motto "What Would Jesus Do?". President Bush, a devout fundamentalist Christian, has taught us that Jesus would invade countries for oil, torture prisoners, pollute the environment and reward greedy corporations. I previously uncovered the hip fashions of Extreme Christian Clothing when we learned What Would Jesus Wear? That leads me to food. So, what would Jesus eat?

Jesus would eat at my favorite burger chain In N'Out Burger. They started here in Southern California and have expanded into Nevada and Arizona. The company is privately owned by a Christian family and there are no franchises. I actually used to work in the building which housed their corporate headquarters located near UC Irvine. Their offices spanned the entire top floor of the building. The only way one could visit the top floor was with a security clearance. Besides creating fabulous tasting burgers and shakes, they have managed to sneak in some Christian propaganda onto their soda cups and burger wrappers. You may not realize it but if you look closely you'll see the hidden Bible verses.

Sipping your tasty milkshake you should take heed to Proverbs 3:5 which is written on the bottom of the cup: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding".

The hamburger and cheeseburger wrappers warn of Armageddon with a reference to Revelation 3:20. The soda cups feature the kicker of all New Testament Bible quotes, the infamous John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. "

Does anyone know why sports fans carry signs reading John 3:16? Does Jesus really take sides in a football game anyways?

Next in the series . . . What Would Jesus Watch! Find out which televangelist is the Lord's favorite.

UPDATE: More burger joint musings from Roxanne and Jesse.

Fast Food, Sex & Violence: That's Hot!

Fast food companies are constantly thinking of new ways to advertise their junk food. What better way to entice an audience but with sexy models eating sloppy burgers that drip sauce all over their scantily-clad bodies. Nothing turns me on more than the sight of Paris Hilton eating a Spicy BBQ Burger (video here). Simply the thought of Miss Hilton makes me want to go out and purchase ten Spicy BBQ Burgers! Despite her impressive resume such as her role in The Simple Life, two sex tapes which display her awesome oral skills, and her work on P. Diddy's Vote or Die campaign, some people feel that Miss Hilton is not the proper spokesperson for a family-friendly food chain such as Carl's Jr.

The Parents Television Council (PTC) has stated that the ad is too racy for television and that it amounts to soft-core porn. This is the same group who is lobbying hard for The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act which would raise the maximum fine for indecent broadcasts to $500,000 per violation and would require the FCC to respond to indecency complaints within six months. The PTC are basically a bunch of parents who are too lazy to monitor what their children watch and want the government to censor shows they deem to be indecent (check out their ranking of the best and worst shows on TV). The Los Angeles Times has the lowdown on the blow-back from the Paris Hilton ad:

The Hilton ad is the latest in a string of controversial, often suggestive ads for Carl's Jr. that show how far the company has come from the days when it was run by founder Carl Karcher. The prominent Orange County Republican once had a statue of St. Francis of Assisi placed in the foyer of the company's Anaheim headquarters. Since Karcher was ousted as chairman in 1993, the company has hired the likes of former basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner for its commercials. Now 88, Karcher could not be reached for comment.

Karcher would indeed be shocked. This prominent Orange County Republican was also a prominent Catholic who donated millions of dollars to my Catholic high school (I actually attended class in the Karcher Building). Carl's Jr. has come a long way from its conservative Catholic roots. So what about the other fast food chains? Carl's Jr. can't be the only company using controversial advertising to whore its junk food, right?

Burger King is currently under fire from another pro-family group for their Star Wars: Episode III children's meals. The Dove Foundation argues that Burger King should not endorse a film which is rated PG-13 when they are marketing their meals to children ages 4-9. I don't know about you but I'm more concerned about that creepy plastic-masked king guy who wakes people up in their beds offering them morning sandwiches. That vision is much scarier than Darth Vader killing young Jedi children in Episode III. If you ask me, Burger King advertisers need to lay off the crack pipe. Who came up with the idea to dress Hootie in a purple suit like Cowboy Curtis and make him sing country-western songs?

I agree with these pro-family groups that too much sex and violence is being utilized in advertising. However, I object not for prudish conservative reasons but because I hate consumerism. Using images of titillating sexuality and raw violence to sell products demeans the true beauty of sex and desensitizes us to the brutal reality of violence. Corporate America is happy to assault the public with mass-produced artificial images yet we are prevented from witnessing the real images of war.

The Los Angeles Times reported that U.S. newspapers and magazines print few photos of American dead and wounded. Blaming this on access, logistics and ethics, the ultimate result is an obscured view of the cost of war.

A review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period found almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action. During that time, 559 Americans and Western allies died. The same publications ran 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during that same time.

Many photographers and editors believe they are delivering Americans an incomplete portrait of the violence that has killed 1,797 U.S. service members and their Western allies and wounded 12,516 Americans.

Journalists attribute the relatively bloodless portrayal of the war to a variety of causes — some in their control, others in the hands of the U.S. military, and the most important related to the far-flung nature of the conflict and the way American news outlets perceive their role.

Television may be ridden with violent crime shows like CSI, The Shield and 24 yet they portray fake violence. The real crimes--1,800 dead soldiers, 10,000+ wounded and amputees, widows, children losing their fathers, entire countries destroyed--do not receive much media coverage at all. The corporate media's war coverage is neatly censored by the Pentagon and does not show the true cost of war. Instead of directing their anger towards burger commercials, why don't the pro-family organizations fight to stop the real injustice which is war.

What Would Jesus Wear? Part 2

Last week I wrote a post about a Christian boutique called Extreme Christian Clothing which sells Jesus themed t-shirts and militant evangelical propaganda. Christian clothing stores are on the rise because true believers won't wear heathen clothes from those atheist department stores.   

We all know that Jesus was an American patriot who supported bigotry, intolerance, tax cuts for the rich, pre-emptive war and authoritarian one-party government. The fancy patriots below are dressed in his stylish image.

But what about the other side? Agitprop would like to examine what the anti-Christ would wear. T-Shirt Hell is an online t-shirt retailer specializing in t-shirts promising to offend almost everyone. For instance, their top selling t-shirts are I Did Not Get Britney Pregnant (I Came on Her Tits), What Would Jesus Do for a Klondike Bar?, and Soldiers Need Hummers, Please Support the Cause. I myself wouldn't wear shirts like that but I recommend you check out their site if you're interest in depraved and indecent smut.

. . . 

Agitprop's Pop Quiz: (winner gets a prize)

Jesus preached in the Beatitudes that thou must exercise a heavy handed aggressive foreign policy. When it comes to today's evildoers, Who Would Jesus Bomb?

A) Iran
B) Syria
C) Venezuela
D) Any country with oil, non-Christians or brown skinned people
E) None of the above stupid! Jesus would invade with heavy infantry divisions, not use the air force.

(Hint: Remember folks we're talking about Republican Jesus, not the real Jewish carpenter)

The Idiot Box

Connect, conform, and consume. That is the mantra which television preaches. Billions of people across the world turn on, tune in, and drop out into the temple of light and sound. With its phony sitcoms, competitive reality shows and 24-hour infotainment news networks, the hyper-real world of television is an escape from the economic realities of alienation and oppression. In The Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray Bradbury sums it up quite nicely as he writes:

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. 

This evil Siren is major conversation topic at the office. I usually hear co-workers mumbling about who won on American Idol the previous night or if they remembered to tivo the fifth Law and Order spin-off. Television may have great entertainment value yet there is a dark side. The more we watch, the less we think.

Connect

We're all tuned in. I myself don't watch that much television yet I am still connected just like everyone else. I manage to tivo The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Real Time with Bill Maher, and PBS Frontline. I also try to catch the good documentaries shown on the Sundance Channel or The Discovery Times Channel. I can't stand the big networks with their silly sitcoms and horrid reality shows. The bottom line is that everyone is connected:

• Today, at least one TV is in 98.2% of American households. (Television Bureau of Advertising, 2001)
• Today, most viewers (with cable or satellite) have access to an average of 202.6 available channels. (Television Bureau of Advertising, 2001)
• By age 18, the average American teenager will have spent more time watching television--25,000 hours-- than learning in the classroom. (American Academy of Pediatrics)
• American children ages 2-17 watch television an average of 25 hours per week. One in five watch more than 35 hours of TV each week. (Gentile & Walsh, 2002)

Conform

The media is one of the most powerful instruments of social control, a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class. It can be used for positive endeavors such as educating the public and likewise for negative causes such as spreading misinformation. A news media which focuses on celebrity scandals, political punditry and selling consumer goods as opposed to muckraking journalism is purely defunct. The purpose of journalism is to question, to speak truth to power. Democracy thrives on the free flow of accurate information. The media engages in a systematic effort to dumb down the public and reinforce the values of the system.

In their propaganda model theory, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the systemic biases of the mass media are rooted in structural economic causes. In other words, the media is another part of the ideological superstructure of capitalism which reinforces the dominant paradigm:

First presented in the book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, the theory views private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences rather than news — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five "filters" that sort out the type of news that finally gets published. These are: ownership, funding, sourcing, flak, and anti-communist ideology with the first three being the most important.

They wrote this during the Cold War when anti-communism was still a big deal. Today I would replace anti-communism with uber-patriotism. In the post-9/11 world you are labeled unpatriotic or even pro-terrorist if you question authority or oppose war. Regarding ownership, the news media is controlled by a few conglomerates which filter information and reinforce the ruling class reality. The idiot box just happens to be the wonderful medium which brings the filtered corporate news to the public.

How does television control us if we willfully choose what we watch? Corporations use the ethos of individualism to sell their products. There are a variety of channels that cater to specific interests (food, hunting, sports, etc.) yet they are all part of the same ruling class order. The option of having hundreds of channels is not freedom, it is merely the illusion of choice. The views and opinions expressed by these networks are the same. How many times have you surfed across every channel only to discover that nothing is on? This illusion of freedom and choice not only pacifies us but also hides the fact that we are the commodity being sold.

Consume

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds. --Marshall McLuhan

When we turn on the idiot box we submit ourselves to mind control. We are rapidly assaulted with ads for detergent, pharmaceuticals and silly products. My favorite are the "we're a nice company" propaganda ads in which Walmart or Shell will try to show how they are not destroying workers' rights or the environment, respectively. Television is all about selling us useless shit. We are the target market. We become the product that is sold to large corporations when we buy into the consumerist ideology and go purchase their products. The public exists to provide ratings which in turn provide advertising revenue to the media companies. More commodities purchased by television views equals more advertising which in turn equals more commodities sold. The capitalist ethos is alive and well as the endless cycle of buying and selling continues.

Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out

Television is not one monolithic leviathan of social control. It operates in the democratic tradition by offering many choices instead of just one. It may appear to be a free system yet it serves one purpose--to maintain the current hierarchy and social order. Unless we become the media in a radical act of popular revolt, television will continue to create ruling class reality and the news media will define what is true. News outlets filter their content and would rather cover stories about runaway brides and fingers in chili as opposed to covering the Iraq War. Now the Republicans who control all three branches of government want to exercise political control over public broadcasting stations.

Will PBS become like Fox News Channel? Will Sponge Bob be burned at the stake for his latent homosexual tendencies? Will the Bible replace the United States Constitution? Stay tuned for next time my friends. Same Agitprop time. Same Agitprop channel.

What Would Jesus Wear?

There's nothing worse than being out of style when the Rapture comes.

That's why Lawrence, KN resident Lori Devins created Extreme Christian Clothing, a boutique featuring Christ-worthy clothing at a reasonable price. Her store features t-shirts with slogans such as Got Jesus?, Satan Sucks, and My God can kick your god's butt. That last slogan is sure to keep false god-worshipers away.

"Our shirts are a little extreme, but I think God is spreading the word and having the youngsters shout out their faith," Miss Devins said. "I think teenagers want to evoke a response."

Christian retailers have even co-opted the SoCal style with C28, a store featuring Christian propaganda clothing in surf and skate styles. Why buy a secular Quicksilver shirt when you can wear a cross-bearing Truth Soul Armor shirt?

Hurry, call (888) NEED HIM, because Jesus just loved consumerism.

Sellin' Out Fo Ronnie McD

McDonaldization is clearly with us for the foreseeable future. While such a future will bring people many benefits, the profound irrationalities associated with McDonaldization raise serious questions about such a future, particularly about the "iron cage of McDonaldization," as Max Weber might have phrased it. By "iron cage," I mean that as McDonaldization comes to dominate ever more sectors of society, it will become ever less possible to "escape" from it.

-- from The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer

2005 marks the 50th anniversary of McDonald's--the most well-known symbol of American cultural globalization throughout the world. The golden arches have spread across this planet like a cancer offering predictable food items and modestly clean bathrooms even in the most remote undeveloped lands. Recently, McDonald's has been trying to change its image away from that evil leviathan portrayed in Super Size Me to a more health-conscious neighborhood pal with genuine street cred.

A proposed marketing strategy was for McDonaldization to invade popular music by paying hip-hop artists to name drop McDonald's menu items in their songs. Rappers are excited about the idea and even hip-hop guru Russell Simmons is supportive of the project.

I do believe that the hip-hop genre has long jumped the shark and is willing to whore itself out to the highest bidder. There are still some great underground hip-hop artists with politically conscious voices that will not succumb to capitalist prostitution. However, the loudest voices in popular hip-hop have already sold out. Lesser known artists such as Gatbustaz are trying to ride the Big Mac wave to fame with their song McGangsta. In the near future we can expect Nelly's version of "Pimp My Fries" coupled with the exclusive McHo Sandwich. Only at McDonalds!

Brawny Gets Sexy

I rarely comment about popular culture and advertising in Agitprop. However I intend to tackle these issues more thoroughly in the future in order to explore their use of ideology and propaganda to sell products as well as take a break from the heavy issues and look at the lighter side of life...

Yet another ridiculous ad campaign has been foisted into the land of consumerism. Brawny has a new Internet-based ad campaign called "Innocent Escapes". A few years ago they changed their image from that traditional rugged lumberjack guy to a more sensitive looking clean-shaven man. In this new campaign a real-life Brawny man talks to the camera in a deep sultry voice with lines like "By the way you look beautiful today" and "There's something about your eyes." Watching these clips you forget that the product they're actually selling is paper towels. There are tons of short clips on their website http://www.brawnyman.com/ in which the viewer can choose from a variety of scenarios and customize what the Brawny man says to them. Are housewives so bored and horny that they have to go online so the Brawny man can deliver personalized messages to them? What's so sexy about paper towels anyways? Can't I wipe my kitchen counter without thinking of some guy whispering sweet nothings into a camera? Damn you Brawny, you have scarred me forever!