Henry Rollins is a good friend of mine. Not that I have actually met the man, but I feel that we have a certain kinship in hopes, aspirations, attitude towards all of mankind. Especially in regards to hate. If you can’t find a reason to be angry, then you really are not paying attention. Rollins is the kind of guy who will spend an hour telling you why people need to be stopped and things need to be changed by all possible force before breaking down and letting you know that deep down, below the horror, he really respects and loves humanity.
But don’t tell him that I said that. If asked he’s a mean mofo and that’s the way we all like it.

I reference the man as a matter of segue into a terrible fear that seems to be popping up all over television commercials. I have already mentioned the dangerous quagmire that is intent and anti-tobacco advertising but I will drift down that long and dark road again. Because there is a certain darkness down that road, a seething duplicitous beast with pencils for fangs and radiators for eyes. And a gold chain around his throbbingly veined neck that reads ‘peer pressure.’

As a (shudder) child of the 80s, I have been exposed to roughly a thousand hours of peer pressure related advertisements. The radiation of which has scarred my lungs and left me with a twitch in my lower lip, a scowl of murderous proportions and drool inducing intensity. I couldn’t go a Saturday morning without being told a few hundred times to beware of the things that my peers wanted me to do, that doing something because others were doing it was demented foolishness that must be avoided at all costs.

I sometimes think I was the only one who paid any attention to that stuff. The persecution one faces from going their own path and doing their own thing is ludicrous in this country, especially in the smaller towns and also Texas. But the cracks in the ‘peer pressure’ stratagem were even then apparent.

You should never do something because other people are doing it until you are older. Then you should do exactly what everyone else does, keep your head under the radar, and vote like you are supposed to.

Or ELSE…

The particular duplicity of the concept is laughable enough, the indoctrination of individuality that is later beaten out of you by a system of homogeneous everything. But lately they’ve just convoluted the whole thing in an unacceptable and difficult to follow way.

Take a brief look at even a single block of advertising for an afternoon show and you will get more mixed messages in five minutes then in most of the New Testament.

A brightly colored animated girl tells me that a friend of hers wants her to try pot, saying that everyone is doing it, to which our pastel heroine responds, “If everyones doing it why doesn’t she do it with some one else?” From this we are to assume that a) nobody actually does pot, and b) doing something because other people allegedly do so is foolish. Which is not too far outside of the message that failed to grasp the attention of children in the 80’s and 90’s.

The next commercial is the kicker though, a strangely lighted scene of a plain looking teenage boy approaching a mirror. He struggles to check his too perfect too white teeth for what we assume are supposed to be chew stains (although you should maybe apply make-up to your actors/models if you want to convey certain types of things). He supposedly finds something that triggers his memory of five girls snickering at him and making allusions to his stained (except their not) teeth. Outside of the fact that there are five females sitting together and not one of them is attempting to back stab any of the others for the affection of the chew using bad-boy, and correct me if that seems statistically implausible, there is a dangerous point being made about not doing something because you need to SEEK the approval of the masses.

Does this not strike you as odd? Moments before I was being told to shun the approval of the masses who wanted me to do pot, and now I need to seek the approval of the masses by not doing chew?

How is any person supposed to operate when they are being asked to give completely opposite responses to the same stimulus? Where are our children to turn when they are at the same time supposed to do what they are told, not do what the collective expects of them, and also pay close attention to what the collective thinks of them?

Somehow I think that a lifetime of such irregular and implausible reinforcement would create a broken and jilted youth culture with no values, no mores, no tropes, no ability to make a stand for something, no ability to define a term, no ability to decide when something is right or wrong, everything would just lump into some dizzyingly grey blob that defied definition and sought anonymity from all sides, even gender, and especially accountability.

Oh….