…I’d like to show you another ad featuring children.
Yesterday I criticized this one about man-made global warming. It features a child actress, and is designed to appeal to children especially, and to frighten them into pressuring their parents to do something before all those little kitties and weeping bunnies drown in the CO2-induced floods.
Then a little later that evening I saw the following ad (I think it was on the verboten channel, Fox News). Although I’m quite keen on the message, I noticed that it uses children as well:
Because of having just seen the first ad, I probably found the second one more troubling than I otherwise might have. Even though I think it’s very effective, and even though the message is pitched somewhat more to adults than the anti-global warming ad was, at this point I would prefer to see ads that don’t involve children at all.
Of course, there’s a history to this sort of thing:
That ad wasn’t really aimed primarily at kids either, although most of us heard about it. Of course, in 1964, kids were already well aware of the threat of nuclear holocaust; it had been drummed into them since the 50s, through recurrent drills in school as well as a general focus in the culture.
Johnson’s ad was only shown once and then pulled as too controversial. But it was talked about so much that it became a cause celebre.
One thing I noticed on watching it this time was that in the excerpt from a speech towards the end, Johnson paraphrased the Auden poem “September 1, 1939,” in which Auden wrote “We must love one another or die.” If you think about it, of course, we will all die some day whether or not we love one another, and universal love for all mankind is not a requirement for avoiding nuclear holocaust (fortunately, because I doubt we’ll ever achieve it on this earth).
But still, it’s nice to hear a reference to a poem (and without attribution, too; could Johnson have assumed that most of his audience was already familiar with the Auden work?) in a political speech; I don’t think one hears too much of that nowadays (please feel free, though, to enlighten me and find poetic quotes in recent political addresses).
Ah, but look at the entire poem. If you do, you’ll also see this:
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
Could it be that this poem also inspired George Bush I’s famous “thousand points of light” in his 1988 nomination acceptance speech? When he used that phrase, Bush was referring to non-government volunteers across America, doing good works. I’m not sure about my theory of its origins, though; Peggy Noonan, who wrote the speech, doesn’t seem to know where she might have gotten the phrase.
When I read that stanza again, the passage suggested still another image: the internet and even the blogosphere. Take a look: dotted everywhere/Ironic points of light/Flash out wherever the Just/Exchange their messages.
I’m sure a lot of people would laugh themselves silly at the idea that anything in the blogosphere represented “the Just;” au contraire, they might say. But it’s what we strive for, whether we achieve it or not. And we certainly are dotted everywhere, exchanging messages.
Like this one.
[NOTE: I’m sometimes astounded at how often I begin a post with one theme and one message, and then way leads on to way (another poetic reference) and I end up in a different place than I intended. It’s one of the pleasures of blogging, at least for me.]
Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely 
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Boy are we out of touch if we are worried about adds, and not worred about things like this (or are even aware).
I guess you havent watched Nickelodeon lately
This Nickelodeon “news program”, is not a news program. It is a leftist primer on how to be a “left-wing radical REBEL”.
I am not a blind follower of our Government, and I also think that Government should be watched by it’s citizens. It is our civic duty.
However this program led by Ellerby, is anti-war, anti- GWOT, anti-military.
This “news program” is not about people changing the World around them.
Ms. Ellerby uses leftist propaganda buzz words like “taking on the establishment”.
She shows a group of “tweenagers” walking around in orange jumpsuits, hooded and yelling from a bullhorn. “We are not ok, with people being tortured by American soldiers!” “Are cooperation’s priority over human lives?”
There is also a call for the impeachment of the President in the second segment of the video, “democracy is at stake because of the President violating the Constitution”.
The fourth segment of video shows another tweenager, who has put together a video of wounded Iraqi children, with the song Jesus Loves Me playing over it. This teenager blames America, the military, for what is happening in Iraq. This young girl says “she finds, videos and facts on the Internet” to show what is REALLY happening in Iraq. I am guessing she is getting these images from Al Jazeera.
a lot around this has been flushed down the memory hole. like the website the kids were to go with, etc.
the ads are for the adults… not to scare the kids.
the kids, get to watch nick to get their socialist fix.
Nick has launched “The Big Green Help,” a multimedia campaign that encourages the network’s young viewers to become junior environmentalists, and major finger-waggers. “Nickelodeon’s Big Green Help is all about helping YOU find simple, positive ways to protect the Earth every day,”
and
news.cnet.com/nickelodeon-thinks-green-with-online-multiplayer-title/
In an effort to educate and encourage action, Nickelodeon is set to release what could be the first ever online multiplayer video game that deals with environmental issues. As a component of the broader Big Green Help initiative, the game will tie together an overall theme that the company launched on Earth Day last April.
and of course your not watching disney either and their recent switch to utopianism… with a tree of life…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tree_of_Life_(Disney)
then the child targeted VHEMT
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
www.vhemt.org/
which kind of makes broadways show the Lemmings quite prescient (but then agin they were ivy league college educated and knew what the texts were saying)
the real stuff are the shorts at the end of the page.
“The Stork” 3:00 min
Little bundles of joy delivered by the mythical stork, with natural consequences.
“The Wit and Wisdom of Cancer” 4:30 min.
What would cancer cells say if they progressed to humanity’s advanced level of consciousness?
“Fertco” 3:00 min
Fertility treatments with big box economy.
all cartoons, and in several styles that are popular… (because the characters resemble some characters from the Uk (i think)).
imagine a child watching the stork coming… coming say to bring baby brother.
and you see a flight of storks with babies…
and you see green hills, and wildlife
then the storks drop the babies.
and like the old cartoons they fall
but they dont fall into a chiminey
no… they hit the ground and blow up into instant family, the blowing up resembles a nuclear bomb that instantly turns deer into skeletons..
and set to classical music…
and you can see the storks like bomber runs
this has been going on for decades.
but alas, the complainers were always tin hatters and such and marginalized.
and if you have the stomach to read a very interesting online book.. take it with a grain of salt but its fascinating.. (and he knows his history)
www.mega.nu/ampp/eden/overview.html
Returning to Eden by Daniel Pouzzner
http://www.mega.nu/ampp/
the archetecture of modern political power
the new feudalism…
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
this puts what makes you creeped out….
Pyongyang remix
www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2naSzb1psU
here is comparing it to another regime..
the one that speaks austrian
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPSqL9_mfM
the compared clip is at the end about 4:15
here is the youth that got it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mvP0ArKIGY&feature=player_embedded
Obama’s Militaristic Youth Corp Commercial
[has a verbal ring to it of sym 4 dev]
vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=57605355#
Obama Youth Corp VS The Third Wave Experiment 01 www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/38594
and right now…
no one knows what they are doing.
its not on the radar now
there is a reason why so many regimes do this.
from the INSIDE, it looks different
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
When Auden revised his poems late in life he changed that line to read “We must love one another AND (emphasis mine) die.”
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
In the context of September 1939, I first thought the ironic points of light referred to muzzle flashes from an exchange of gunfire.
Since I had to hike a long, wordy path to learn his trick, it was no surprise to read it first appeared in The New Republic.
I suppose when it comes to war poems, Auden is fine but but Owen is quicker.
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
neo, there’s a typo that might have others wondering what Johnson could connect to pre-invasion Normans
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:28 pm
mizpants: That’s fascinating. I hadn’t known that; I guess I’m with Austen, though, in finding fault with the line (I think it works poetically, however). Looking it up, I found the following:
Soon after writing the poem, Auden began to turn away from it, apparently because he found it self-flattering to himself and to his readers. When he reprinted the poem in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945) he omitted the famous stanza that ends “We must love one another or die.” In 1957, he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, “Between you and me, I loathe that poem” (quoted in Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 478). He resolved to omit it from his further collections (it did not appear in his 1966 Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957).
In the mid-1950s Auden began to refuse permission to editors who asked to reprint the poem in anthologies. In 1955 he allowed Oscar Williams to include it complete in The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse with the most famous line altered to read “We must love one another and die.” Later he allowed the poem to be reprinted only once, in a Penguin Books anthology Poetry of the Thirties (1964), with a note saying about this and four other early poems, “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Matthew M: What’s the typo? Give me a hint. Sometimes they’re hard to find.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Neo,
That note is really something. Only a figure as major and adored as Auden could get away with that kind of public self-flagellation. And even though I think the “and die” is truer than the “or die” version, it really works against the meaning of the poem, doesn’t it? Or at least doesn’t make much sense.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:20 pm
“September 1, 1039,”
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Matthew M: Oops! Will fix.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Peggy Noonan got “a thousand points of light” from Prof. Helen Brudner her History teacher at Fairleigh Dickinson University. My wife was in the same class as Peggy. My wife has an astounding memory for this sort of thing. -PB
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:49 am
Exploitation of children for propaganda: knock it off.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:52 am
I think whoever said they showed the Daisy ad once only was mistaken. I saw it and most of my friends saw it. And we were around 14, not a prime political ad-watching group.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Nolanimrod: I believe they showed it only once on TV as an advertisement. It was shown quite a bit on the news, and discussion shows.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Prof. Helen Brudner’s husband was a theoretical physicist and she’s brilliant as well. I totally agree with Plato and Peggy Bunker that Brudner is the real source for “a thousand points of light.”