Posted by
gilroy man on Friday, June 13, 2008 12:37:38 AM
It turns out another party has taken credit for the advent of gay marriage in California. Tila Tequila, the MTV show host who pretends to be bisexual, stated that she felt her show made a difference in changing people’s attitudes towards gay marriage by showing that everybody is “into it” and that it’s “cool”. Whether her claim of credit is true or not, her example is the lib strategy in a nutshell. Push your alternative lifestyle of choice into every media venue you can, and present a vision to the public of “normality”. And it’s not just a lib strategy. Advertisers use it to sell products. After all, you don’t want to be the only one without a trendy new Iphone, do you? Or the clumsy person using cash to slow everyone in line down instead of using the obviously more efficient debit/check card?
Another example is the old tv show “Dallas”. Audiences in Eastern Europe lapped up the show because they fell in love with the lifestyle of the rich and famous that was displayed to them. It didn’t matter to them that the show was fake, the vision that JR and Pam and all the others put in their mind, the fancy cars and cocktail parties, did more to push capitalism into the ex communist block than any of Reagan’s speeches.
You see, humans are pack animals. They are greatly influenced by what other people do. Either they want to join the pack so they don’t miss out on the next big thing, or they revolt against the pack and claim they are superior to the herd. The power of mass media to shape public values is truly frightening. We now know that judges in pornography cases are involved in the same smut that they are supposed to issue rulings on. It wouldn't surprise me to see them watching MTV as well.
And all along, the media types play the shameless game of “we just reflect society, we don’t influence it”. What a joke, except in California it’s not funny anymore.