--- On Mon, 6/15/09, Andy <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Andy <andy274 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Politicization of everyday life
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, June 15, 2009, 4:23 PM
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:11 PM,
> Wojtek
> Sokolowski<swsokolowski at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > [WS:] When I got freshly off the boat some 28 years
> ago, I was surprised how politicized everyday life in
> Amerika was. Not just the ubiquitous flag waving
> (virtually unheard of in Europe at that time) but seemingly
> benign areas, such as children cartoons. So piping
> political speeches into phones may be crude, but not out of
> line with thinly veiled politicization of every day life.
>
> Politicized, or propagandized?
>
[WS:] I think "propagandized" is a more accurate term here. "Politicization" implies discourse and weighing ideas, rather than spoon-feeding them.
Examples of "propagandization" in children cartoons include a series (I do not remember the title) in which construction machines played the role of evil robots, a thinly veiled allusion to labor. There were other depicting adventures of a couple of all-American youth in the horrible land of Eastern Europe. Again I do not remember the titles - I know of them only because my son was watching them (I do not watch much TV myself.) That was a sharp contrast with the children cartoons I knew from Eastern Europe - which were remarkably free of any political propaganda contents, especially those smearing other peoples.
While we are at that, I did once a project for my media theory class (when I was in graduate school) in which I compared the breadth of coverage in American and Soviet TV evening news. The Soviet program had a much broader international coverage, especially those featuring underdeveloped countries. I have to admit that one can find decent programming in the US public media (especially NPR) - but these are received by rather narrow audiences. The commercial stuff, aimed at "the masses" is simply horrible spoon-fed pablum for morons, especially comparing to what is, or rather used to be, the norm in Europe.
Wojtek