Big Babies
Michael Bywater’s essay entitled “We’re all Big Babies” really ties a lot of my speculation of the last ten years together in a new way. I’m one of those bizarre people who threw out my TV set years ago, so I’m somewhat more immune to Marketing Messages than the average person, and in fact often scratch my head over the latest meme or fashion du jour.
Michael speculates that because of the proliferation of “Marketing Message” as arbiter of taste and judgment, we’ve all turned into a bunch of Big Babies who can’t think for ourselves and don’t take responsibility for our own lives (as opposed to “lifestyles”) resulting in disasters such as the War in Iraq (slogan: The Axis of Evil.) He goes on to say:
It’s never too late… never too late to stomp, cadaverous, around the stage singing ‘Can’t get no satisfaction’.Never too late to cast off the old wife and find a new one. Never too late to make the big killing, to score the goal, to find the perfect shoes, to acquire the perfect six-pack, rack, complexion, butt, pecs or thighs. Never too late (hell, someone must be answering the spam) to get the perfect dick, pumped up with a scoopful of mail-order Viagra; never too late to give her the perfect orgasm, get the perfect house, fill it with the perfect furniture, take the perfect vacation, drive the perfect car…
As the body ineluctably decays (the mind’s long gone, of course; who needs it?), perpetual infantility glosses over the rheum, the pains and creaks and flaccidities. As the opportunities dwindle, perpetual infantility offers us illusion on easy terms with pick-’n'-mix spirituality, self-improvement, angels and goddesses, diversion and aspiration.
As time slides past, doling out its irreversible quanta, perpetual infantility offers us… the perfect wristwatch: shockproof, waterproof, antimagnetic, a perpetual movement which says everything about us except the single intolerable truth: that we have had it and are headed for oblivion, tick by tick.
One of the problems with being a Big Baby is that the self declared “parents” are systematically stripping from us all vestiges of the ability to think for ourselves, not to mention thinking or acting autonomously. How is this being done and by whom? Think slogans. If someone is pushing a slogan they are infantilizing you. Those someones are, for the most part, in Government, in Big Business, and in Big Religion.
I’ll let you read his solution for yourself. It’s one I’ve already embraced, for the most part. It started the day I threw out the TV.
Technorati Tags: Responsibility, Life, Adulthood
