posted 2007/07/01 at 15:10
Today marks six months of continuous dieting for me, or at least continuous in the plan I started at the beginning of the year where I allow myself Saturdays and other special occasions off of my diet, as long as I don't overeat or eat too much really bad stuff. (To date the only "special occasion" I've had was my birthday.) Given that I was out of the house taking care of other business in the early afternoon yesterday, when I got hungry I decided to head to Gino's Pizza -- one of Toledo's oldest and most-loved pizza places -- and have some cheese pizza and cheesy breadsticks. I used to have to cross the county line to get to a good Gino's location, but recently a new location closer to me opened, and I went there to dine in for only the second time ever.
This being a fairly new location, a few of the booths had flat-panel televisions built into the adjacent walls, and since there was only one other diner in the pizzeria at the time, I decided I might as well grab a booth with a television. I'd wanted the booth that had some kind of football game on its television, but that booth was taken, so I picked another booth at random, not knowing what channel that television was tuned to at the time because it was running commercials when I sat down. Imagine my horror when I found that not only was that particular television tuned to MTV, and that I couldn't change the channel, but that I just happened to sit down there while MTV was in the middle of a marathon of My Super Sweet 16. I only knew of this particular show because I happened to catch an episode of South Park that lampooned it, but even though the in-wall televisions didn't have any sound coming out of them, it wasn't too hard to tell what all was being said just by watching the pictures and stuff.
Now, I spent a large portion of my academic career learning how to decode the hidden messages that are out there in our media- and corporate-driven culture, and even though I don't identify myself economically as a Marxist, I believe that Marxist readings of modern culture can provide a tremendous insight as to the deepest problems underlying our society today. Both in my academic writings and my other writings, including on this Website, I put a lot of effort into trying to explain these readings in the simplest, clearest words possible, so that other people can hopefully understand just how poisonous our hyper-capitalistic culture can be, and learn how to spot these problems in their own lives. That all being said, I don't think it is actually possible or necessary for me to provide any critique of My Super Sweet 16. Watching birthday parties with banners noting the forty-plus corporate sponsors of the party, ranging from Christian Dior to Sony, there are just no words to describe how unbelievably messed up this whole spectacle is.
Perhaps this is just me romanticizing my youth, but I do like to think that, at least for a few years there in the mid-1990s, MTV managed to somehow turn itself into a halfway-watchable network. Listening to the 90's station on Urge Radio reminds me that yes, we had our share of insipid "boy bands" and one-hit wonders (I almost inserted an extra "s" into that phrase), but on the whole, between the influence of Lilith Fair on the dwindling music video content, a news division that amazingly walked the line between being entertaining and being informative (oh how I pine for the days of Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren), and the greatest American-produced cartoon of the decade (Daria, which might have saved my teenage years had it come out a few years sooner), I actually watched quite a bit of MTV there and was happy with it. This being the 1990s and the youth culture generally being more angsty and all, I'd like to think that if MTV had produced something along the lines of My Super Sweet 16 back then, it would have been a deliberate act of criticism, rightfully showing, if not mocking, the follies of material and wealth obsession. In today's culture, though, particularly given the popularity of other shows such as Cribs and Pimp My Ride, I honestly get the impression that shows such as those and My Super Sweet 16 are intended to celebrate and glorify the wrongheaded quest for material wealth.
I will never raise children because, to paraphrase Richard Belzer's character from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, more than not wanting the responsibility of a kid, I wouldn't want to give a kid the responsibility of me. There was a time when I thought about having children, though, and I was bound and determined back then that I would never censor anything my child/ren wanted to see, whether for reasons of morality or sex or even violence. I would provide some real strong counterpoints to material that I personally found objectionable (namely senseless violence), but I thought it would be best for my children to be exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible. I don't want to say that I would prevent my hypothetical children from watching My Super Sweet 16 if they wanted to, but at the same time this incident yesterday is making me think about just how feasible it is to introduce a pre-teen to the works of Henry Giroux.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon