Alright kids, time for a lesson in the power of media. You may not know it right now, but you’re little more than cognitive automatons, pre-conditioned by someone else to accept or reject information presented to you. You see, before World War II (that, for you freshmen, was the last big one, 1939-45 – and for the Americans among you, that’s not a typo or a mistake), the wisdom was that any organization that wanted to control public opinion should try to control what information people were exposed to. That pretty much meant only governments even tried. Radio airwaves and newspapers were subject to censorship, and some governments went to great lengths to make sure their citizens never saw certain news items, or never read certain subversive books. During the war, various governments invested enormous resources into the latest technology and police techniques to try and catch people in the treasonous capital offense of listening to the wrong radio station.
Since then, propaganda and public information control has gotten a lot more sophisticated. Now, they use cartoon bunnies with Brezhnev eyebrows. The idea now is not so much to control what you see, but to control how you’re going to react to it. What will you take seriously? What will you reject as absurd? What will cause you to go out and smash a store window, or buy your third cousin flowers, or both? Yes, we live in a whole new Orwellian world of propaganda, and this opens the door to all sorts of actors to shape you in all kinds of ways. And the only way to open your eyes is to know their techniques. Which brings us to the Trix rabbit.
Now some of you are already rejecting this idea as absurd, and you don’t even know what the idea is. Think about that when you evaluate the effectiveness of the post-war propaganda complex. We all know the Trix rabbit, that pathetic sugar junkie, jonesing for a fix since 1961, willing to wear the stupidest, most ineffective disguises to get his hands on a bowl of cereal. We also know what usually happens to him. He gets flippantly laughed off by some kids as they eat whole boxes of the stuff right in his face.
Okay. Here is a surface analysis of the Trix ad campaign. Then, we’ll go through the mirror and look at the deep shit. On the surface, the Trix ads are all about socializing you, from a very early age, that it’s normal not to share your resources with those who are different from you. Especially with those who aren’t “supposed” to have access to those resources. Nice.
Now for the really scary stuff. In 1968, when Tricky Dick Nixon (oh look, a linguistic coincidence!) was running for the White House, General Mills had a ballot in which kids were asked to vote on whether the rabbit should get a bowl of Trix. The rabbit won in a landslide. Same in the Reagan year of 1980, and again in 1984. Every time, one TV commercial showed the rabbit having one bowl of Trix. Then the kids went back to their denigrating, denying ways.
The election of 1992 was different. Instead of holding a ballot, General Mills issued a statement that the President of kids everywhere had decreed that Trix really were for kids, and that the rabbit wouldn’t get any. There hasn’t been a ballot since. So in 1992, the year Bush puppet Bill Clinton took the White House, the kids were told that some unelected official had cancelled the election. I don’t remember a toddler revolution in 92.
Think about it. There is a generation of kids out there, now in their early 20s (that would be you lot), for whom it is normal to have some anonymous figure announce that there is no election. Who cares, right? Elections don’t make a difference anyway! They won’t change the distribution of resources, and they won’t change who sits at the breakfast table and who gets to go hungry. That’s what you’ve been led to assume since you were a five year old laughing at the antics of a silly rabbit on a 20-inch CRT. What else has been conditioning you to accept the end of democracy? What else has been encouraging you not to worry about silly things like Continuity of Government? Keep your eye on the ball kids. Keep your eye on the ball.
~ Professor X
