Jacob Fraden | What’s dancing on TV?

“An American won’t buy anything that doesn’t sing or dance on television.” (Life observation)

Americans traditionally have been spoiled by a great variety of goods and services. Walk into a store and there is an embarrassment of riches: what to buy? Dozens of kinds of coffee, chips, drinks, cars — everything. How does one decide what to choose, especially if thinking is not a strong quality of the buyer? That’s where a television commercial comes in — it suggests a solution and gets rid of the painful problem of choice. Every 5-10 minutes it interrupts the program and pokes the viewer’s eyes and ears with its goods in the most attractive way. To enhance the effect and to cut into the memory very often inanimate objects move, sing and dance. For example, if the sausage is tap-dancing or singing on the screen, buy that sausage, don’t hesitate. Yes, it’s more expensive, but if it dances so dashingly, you can’t go wrong. Over the years, television commercials have become part of the flesh and blood of the average American. If, by some magic, it was to disappear, the poor fellow would starve to death.

Commercials take up from 37 to 50% of screen time and are the main source of income for television and radio stations. In most cases, advertisements on all channels appear simultaneously, so don’t try to change the channel, there will be commercials, too. Nowadays it has also taken over the Internet. For a financial support, websites have to run ads on their pages, mostly supplied and controlled by Google. Ads pry into your eyes, unceremoniously interfere with text, and on YouTube, in the most inappropriate places they cut into the action of films, lectures and concerts, tearing apart musical performances. There’s no escaping commercials, we’ve grown accustomed to it, and they become almost as much a physiological part of our lives as food, toilets, and sleep.

In the good old days, commercials were carefully aimed at certain circles of customers and every cent spent on them had to work effectively and bring in profits. With the participation of psychologists clear rules have been developed, or if you will – the laws of optimal advertising. Producers developed commercials for certain target customers for each particular region of the country. For example, they would never advertise beach umbrellas on TV stations broadcasting to Alaska, or skis and warm jackets for Hawaiians. The demographics and ethnic makeup of potential customers in not-so-distant times was a deciding factor in the choice of actors and style of advertising. For example, if a station broadcasts in New York City, then the ads were designed with white and black actors in the appropriate proportion to the ethnic composition of the population. Specifically for New York City: 32% whites, 22% blacks, and the rest Hispanics and Asians. Moreover, for the black customers the mostly advertised goods were hamburgers and Coca-Cola, for Latinos — burritos and tequila, and for the whites – whiskey and insurance. Whatever was in real life, so was on the screen. It’s been done that way before and it worked well. To be more persuasive, an ad should feature someone similar to a target customer in both the spirit and appearance, the character should be someone you want to associate with yourself. Every potential customer saw on the screen its kind of people and followed their advice — which sausage to buy, which car to look at, and so on. This was the case not only in the U.S., but all over the world. It is very unlikely that, say, a certain African country would advertise toothpaste, showing the face of a white person on the screen — the face must be of the color of its population, otherwise — who would believe it?

In the last few years, however, something has happened to the brains of those who pay for and produce commercials in America. The laws of effective marketing have been forgotten or ignored and everything was turned upside down. In the evening I turn on the TV to watch the news and a certain security firm commercial pops up. On the screen: two charming to the point of sweetness guys, apparently “husband” and “wife”, talking how they live comfortably and safely in their home with the promoted alarm system. That doesn’t appeal much to me, so I switch to another channel and watch a commercial for a very expensive SUV, galloping along a bumpy snow-covered mountain road. A dashing black girl is driving it (she must be very rich to be able to buy such a luxury vehicle), while in the back seat a frightened white grandpa is shaking. It’s unclear who is he — a father (?), or just a knucklehead passenger that was picked up on the road. I am already faintly hoping for a common sense, but decided to change the TV channel again, and what is there? I see a luxurious mansion, a happy family: a white husband, a black wife and Asian children having dinner. What a typical American family! I recall the words of Vladimir Zvorykin, one of the inventors of television: “The most important thing in a television set is a switch”. That’s what I use.

In the United States today, the white population (not including Hispanics) is 57.8% and all whites, including Hispanics, are 76.3%. In real life the whites are still in the majority, but now on TV and the Internet they are swept under the rug like trash. White actors now appear in only 15.7% of all commercials, and then only in cases where they are absolutely indispensable — for promotion of health insurance, gold, monetary loans and some medicinal ointments. Moreover, if a white person appears in a commercial, he/she is usually old, sick, a freak, or at the very least, an appendage to a black partner. If there’s a doctor on the screen, he’s black, while the patient is always white. And if white children or teenagers appear, they are from some genetically strange “families” where blacks, whites, mulattoes, and Asians are mixed up. White young men appear in only 4% of the commercials! If some aliens began to study the population of Planet Earth through TV commercials, then they would have a somewhat distorted picture of us, to put it mildly.

So what is the reason for such a strange aberration, why the advertisers began to ignore the long-standing rules of marketing and obviously to the detriment of their own financial interests fill the media space with such blunder? The answer is both simple and complex. At the heart of this nonsense is hypertrophied political correctness, and in a totally grotesque form that even a genius like Orwell could not have foreseen. Business executives go out of their way to publicly show their conformity with the universal “diversity” and “critical racial theory” (CRT), whose “theorists” demand that the alleged racism against black people be eliminated and that the white man be blamed for all the sins one can imagine. Another major “theorist”, Mao Zedong, used to say, “To straighten a crooked stick, you have to bend it the other direction”. So they bend it, replacing non-existent oppression of blacks with real oppression of whites, i.e. planting racism-in-reverse.

One can’t help but wonder why the white population, which is still in the majority in the U.S., accepts it all obediently and silently? Why is there no fierce resistance to the idiocy? Why doesn’t anyone shout, “The king is naked!” Why don’t people at all levels, from big business executives to small-time employees, tell political correctness to go to hell? After all, the U.S. is not Stalin’s USSR, and anyone who disagrees with the party line or for a slip of tongue is not yet sent to a camp or shot. Why is there such stifling conformity among the American people, formerly known for their independence and uncompromising freedom of speech? The answer is simple and sad: the reason is fear, albeit on a more vegetarian level than it was under the Soviet rule.

Working people keep their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs, not getting a holiday bonus, not getting promoted, etc. This is humanly understandable, and I wouldn’t blame such people, although I wouldn’t respect them either. But what are people of higher positions afraid of — the heads and owners of small and large businesses, the factories, TV stations and research facilities? What is threatening them? Indeed, nobody is going to drive them out of their jobs or take their business, because neither a governor nor even the President has the power to do that yet. What are they afraid of? I think the reason is fear again, though of a different kind. They are afraid of various inconveniences: negative articles in the leftist press, frivolous lawsuits, loss of state and federal licenses, government contracts, unexpected audits by the IRS, fines for alleged violations of “minority rights,” and the like small and large troubles.

As Karl Marx, the ideologue of communism once wrote, “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” which makes them a driving force in a struggle. But what if they are not “proletarians,” but anyone, and if they do have something to lose? Then what? Life in America for the vast majority of the population is still quite comfortable (some “chains”!), and no one is tempted to lose their established comfort. People think that if they don’t go against the tide and keep quiet, then the weather will blow over and everything will sort itself out. No, my friends, it will not! Comfort kills the will to resist and produces conformism, and conformism inevitably leads to stagnation, degradation of society, reduction of living standards and, finally, to loss of that very comfort. Sooner or later it will bring the full circle.

So what we to do? I am not calling anyone to the barricades, but only ask: Don’t live by lies. The least any of us can do today is not participate in the lies of the CRT and other political correctness: not watch their movies, not read their newspapers, not vote for the conformist candidates, not support them financially, and certainly never under any circumstances buy anything that in a politically correct manner is singing and dancing on a TV or computer screen.

© Jacob Fraden, 2022
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