OUR SOVIET TV
By Kevin Michael Grace
You know what PSAs are, right? Public service announcements, so called. What is the public service they perform, I wonder. In my country, radio and TV stations are forced to play this agitprop as a condition of licensing; one sees and hears fewer of them in the United States.
Currently, I’m assaulted oh a dozen times a day by a PSA spot from the B.C. Schizophrenia Society. Therein, some guy tells his married friends he’s been diagnosed, and they profess the utmost sympathy. Liberal enough for you? Not half. Subtitles run underneath their pronouncements "reading their minds" and proving them hypocrites—they’re afraid of him, and how about that? How very much like the paranoia demonstrated by real schizos.
As the great Thomas Szasz has demonstrated, there is no such thing as asymptomatic schizophrenia. The symptoms are the disease. It’s not like someone goes in for a physical, and the doctor says, "Oh, by the way, your blood test indicates schizophrenia." How is schizophrenia diagnosed? Initial stage: Your belief that the Jews, the Martians, the CIA, the Rockefellers and
the Royal Family are controlling your thoughts. Terminal stage: You are arrested for stabbing someone, usually fatally, usually your mother, identified as a conduit for the Jews, Martians, CIA, etc.
As a long-time student of classical liberalism, PSAs leave me puzzled. Ludwig von Mises was careful to distinguish between the free economy, the socialist economy and the mixed economy.
He always insisted the latter could only be judged by as a distinct entity. I wonder what he would have thought of a society that treated free will as something that existed and didn’t exist, as circumstances dictated. Correct me if I’m wrong libertarians, but I’ve always understood that freedom was a nullity if God (or what have you) had not given us the freedom to choose between
good and evil.
The foregoing is a lengthy introduction to an earlier consideration of PSAs, a Galaxy 500 column
first published four years ago.
Feel bad TV
Public service announcements are the guilt tax of the affluent society
BC Report, April 19, 1999
The first public service announcement I remember starred Smokey the Bear. After we children had been suitably appalled by footage of a wilderness holocaust, this cartoon ursine was trotted on to declare mournfully, "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." He certainly sold me. I would never be so wicked as those adults that failed to properly extinguish their campfires. Some time later I discovered that most forest fires are started not by sinful man but by Mommy Nature— lightning. Since then I have not believed a single word of any PSA.
AIDS is everyone's disease? Ha ha. Only you can stop racism? Pull the other one. This is your brain on drugs? No, this is your brain on drugs. But most PSAs today are state propaganda in disguise. BCTV, B.C.'s most-watched station, now runs so many Government of B.C. ads it has become Glen Clark's Ministry of Truth. They come in three types: boastful, bullying and baleful.
The boastful is represented by those ads that squander hundreds of thousands of dollars to brag about the hundreds of millions of additional dollars added to those already squandered on healthcare and education. Or "Investing in Our Kids," as they prefer to put it.
The bullying is represented by the new wave of don't-drink-and-drive ads. You will notice that where once we were admonished not to drive drunk, temperance has been supplanted by "zero tolerance." My favourite uses a good news-bad news routine. The bad news is that our young motorist is about to be CheckStopped. The good news is that he is under the legal limit. The bad
news is that he is arrested anyway. Impairment, you see, is far more complicated than a mere blood-alcohol ratio. Now, the chances of this happening are about the same as Glen Clark telling the truth, but the principle has been established. Big Brother is no longer Mr. Nice Guy.
The baleful is represented by a Workers' Compensation Board ad I will call "Darcy." Darcy's mother laments her son's death in a workplace accident and expresses her pantheistic belief that his spirit lives on in nature. Darcy may or may not be a real person (I suspect the latter), and I do not for a moment intend to belittle any bereaved mother's grief. But this is a private emotion, and
there is nothing I (or any other stranger) can do to assuage it.
The WCB would be performing a genuine public service if it were reminding us that death comes to us all, but of that day and hour knoweth no man. As Muriel Spark reminds us, life lived without an awareness of death is insipid. "Darcy," however, is another manifestation of the modern heresy that the abolition of death is imminent.
About the time "Darcy" first aired I read newspaper reports about a B.C. company on trial for the on-the-job death of an employee. It seems this Darcy had climbed into a chicken evisceration machine while it was in operation. As it happens, I once worked for the WCB. At the end of my janitorial shift, I was supposed to empty the contents of my trash bag into a compacting machine
and then turn the crank. I was loath to do so, however, as my supervisor had warned me of the many dangerous and disgusting things WCB clients were wont to dispose of on the premises. He instructed me that under no circumstances was I to put my hands in the machine while it was in
use, but after several evenings of hearing the splintering noises made by the dangerous things—and the squelching noises made by the disgusting things—I decided to dump my refuse in the machine and then slink away.
So I cannot imagine what would possess anyone to risk disembowelment, but I do know this. Even if the Rand Corporation develops a minty gel that removes death's sting, young men will continue to climb into chicken evisceration machines, and no amount of PSAs will change human nature.
Perhaps PSAs do persuade some that you should Just Say No to evisceration. But I doubt it. That is not their purpose.
PSAs are actually the guilt tax of the affluent society (guilt, of the free-floating, non-specific kind, that has replaced conscience in our post-Christian world). You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile, and you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself, well, shouldn't I feel guilty? Not to worry. Just turn on your TV and you will learn of countless Kosovos of misery, maybe right in your neighbourhood or even in your beautiful house. We can't do anything about them, but at least we can feel bad about it.