opinion@dailylobo.com
In a nation with multiple networks devoted to cartoons 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you may have heard this one before: Back in my day we didn’t have 24-hour cartoon channels. And it’s true, there was no Cartoon Network, no Nicktoons, Nick Jr. or Disney Channel for kids to watch animated mayhem and violence at any moment of the day. Cartoons were on the three big networks and that was it, Monday through Friday 7-9 a.m. and 3-5 p.m. and Saturday mornings 8-11 a.m. Aside from that, programming was devoted to things people who were kids don’t remember because they weren’t cartoons.
I remember those times and I wonder if kids these days understand the rich times in which they are living. Even the commercials on these networks are mostly cartoons. Entire networks are devoted to make-believe and fantasy which allows kids to escape the reality of the world. They get to spend time in a safe haven and move away from the real world and its true issues. I think about these children and wonder how hard it would be on them if they were to lose all of these networks — if they woke up tomorrow and 24/7 cartoon networks were gone. What place in television would allow them the escape from facts and reality inherent to the world? Where could they go to watch make-believe and mistakes made without consequence? Where would these poor kids turn?
Fox News, of course! Indeed, this 24/7 network dedicated to American-style news would be a perfect refuge for children starved for fiction in a world full of facts. A network filled with characters that absolutely lack character, who have become caricatures of what newspeople should be. These are not David Brinkleys, reporting unbiased facts with no slant or opinion.
These are not people looking to be fair and balanced, reporting pure fact. They are as anthropomorphic as any cartoon in their attempt to have human characteristics such as compassion and sympathy while not really being human.
Sure, they can express compassion or sympathy for a person or cause, but it usually involves a Droopy the Dog ‘I’m-so-happy’ quality about it. Usually it’s to sympathize with Person A because Entity B caused some tragic consequence in Person A’s life. The sympathy is usually less about concern for Person A and more concern with lambasting Entity B. They seem about as far removed from reality as any cartoon character is, and in fact seem more similar to cartoon characters than human beings.
Fox’s anchors have all the myopia of a Mr. Magoo coupled with a stone-age thinking modality that would jibe with the Flintstones.
They make a wonderful Lucy to the Charlie Brown of their followers, always holding some football down to jerk away. Their arguments and talking points resonate with the redundancy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck debating duck season versus rabbit season, except thankfully Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny refrained from littering their talking points with ad hominem attacks and slippery slope fallacies. Much like the Smurfs, they show that being small invites the invention of words to drive their own narrative in a world that frightens them. Where else but in cartoons can you invent words so readily accepted into the national lexicon? You would think by now Fox News should have smurfed a solution to the problems smurfing America today.
It’s been apparent in the recent gun control conversations that Fox presents its arguments with all the rootin’, tootin’est, gun shootin’est Yosemite Sam bluster it can muster. There’s no look at facts and statistics about America’s gross amounts of gun violence, even when it’s aimed at our greatest national resource: children. Even the future of America, the lives of its children, is not a compelling point they’ll see when compared to the past of this nation. A past where rich, god-fearing slave owners had the right to marginalize and disenfranchise everyone and own limitless amounts of guns. Fortunately, slavery, marginalization and disenfranchisement have made their way out of the American dialogue. It would be nice to see gun control become a part of the American dialogue. Instead we get more metaphorical six-guns shooting in the air with no attention paid to where the bullets land as long as they drive the debate off the stage.
Fox News and its anchors have a Dudley Do-Right sense of moral expectations that do not fit with the real world today. While noble in their ideas, a puritanical policy of avoidance of social problems will not alleviate them. Holding fast to the notion of Polly Pureheart and the nuclear family dream will not end teen pregnancy, drug use, abortion or other social aspects of America today. Doses of reality might help fix these problems, but this is a cartoon network and reality is not their business.
Fox News would have you believe it has all the answers, much like Felix the Cat. It doesn’t offer solutions when it comes to problems and issues in this nation. Its anchors only proffer opinions on those problems and issues. Perhaps they expect their viewers to keep believing they will soon reach into their bag of tricks and pull out a solution — because certainly the bag of ideology tricks has fixed countless problems in the history of the world, hasn’t it? Or maybe there is the expectation that, like Bugs Bunny, they will reach into nonexistent pockets in their fur to pull out 500-pound hammers to belabor the problems into being fixed. The problem is they’ve made the issues into cartoons themselves. From the parties and peoples with opposing views becoming the godless commie Boris Badenov, to Speedy Gonzales being their archetype of immigration. They exist as cartoons and therefore see the world unrealistically.
Fox News is playing no small part in the downward spiral of American politics and public life. Sadly, if the nation runs obliviously off a cliff and hovers in the air for a moment, legs running in place before hurtling into the ground below, the nation won’t just crawl out of some silhouette-shaped crater and carry on. If a gigantic anvil comes crashing down from the sky onto the head of the U.S., we won’t just slither out in some honking, accordion-like manner to re-inflate ourselves by blowing into our thumbs. Fox News is helping to cultivate a climate and mood in politics in this country that is of no good use to anyone, including its own fan base. Even children understand when Wile E. Coyote falls off that cliff or eats that anvil, it’s not real. Sadly, Fox News and its followers can’t grasp the difference between cartoon and reality.
And if Fox news is going to perpetuate a cartoonish state of affairs in broadcasting, it should back a guy like Wile E. Coyote. He always tries in new and creative ways. He has never succeeded and still believes he can’t fail. He is persistent, confident, competitive and oblivious to his own danger in trying to make things better for himself. These are qualities that Fox News could certainly use in even the smallest of measure, except these are human qualities and it’s doubtful Fox News could develop them. Or Fox News can carry on as it is until the final grinding end with that Looney Tunes calliope music playing while it stutters, “that’s all folks.”
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