The Free Market 9, no. 6 (June 1991)
Ludwig von Mises disliked hardboiled detective novels because he always knew who the murderer would be: not the butler, but a prosperous and respected gentleman of high social standing who pretends to virtue, but is actually a hidden criminal and sanctimonious hypocrite. Mises saw egalitarian envy in such tales.
It’s no different on television. From the A-Team to Murder She Wrote, a staple plot of mystery thrillers is the profit-seeking capitalist who goes over the line. But now the Disney Studios and Stephen Cannell, one of television’s most prolific producers, have gone one step further.
In the old days, capitalism and the profit motive had to be demonized indirectly. The pursuit of profit was portrayed as evil to the extent that it led to murder, kidnaping, theft, etc. This was all too often, but the idea of a moral businessman was at least conceivable. Not so today.
Disney’s new prime time show, The 100 Lives of BlackJack Savage, has a simple if bizarre plot. The first episode opens with a New York capitalist hounded by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading. It’s no accident that he looks like Michael Milken.
Tarberry, the capitalist, escapes to a banana republic, which presumably lacks an extradition treaty with the U. S., and buys a haunted castle. Enter BlackJack, a 300-year-old ghost. While alive, Black Jack murdered, pillaged, raped, etc. Today, he roams the earth to atone for his sins. To do so, he must save 100 lives, and he wants Tarberry’s help.
Capitalist Tarberry is reluctant to cooperate, until he finds that he is targeted for Hell. Corporate takeovers have condemned him to eternal damnation! Black Jack makes it clear to those who haven’t gotten the message. “You and me,” he tells Tarberry, “we’re the same.” The serial murderer and the capitalist are moral equivalents, courtesy of Disney and Cannell.
As if this weren’t bad enough, BlackJack and Tarberry set out to rescue some poor and noble natives who are being mysteriously murdered. Who’s the culprit? A businessman, of course, illegally dumping toxic wastes into the ocean and killing anyone who notices.
Toxic waste is the Great Satan of the month. After all, the most serious charge against Saddam Hussein, his “crime against humanity,” was the killing of some dolphins and sea birds with an oil slick.
Anti-capitalism is even worse in children’s canoons, however. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the most popular of the new propaganda vehicles. For those who have somehow managed to miss the television show, the movies, the Barbara Walters interview, the records, the pizza promotion deals, and the toys, the Turtles are sword-carrying, ninja fighting, human-sized turtles led by a big rat. Created in an accident involving—that’s right—toxic waste, the Turtles now exact retribution from, among others, the capitalists who inadvertently created them.
In a recent episode, the evil genius brainwashed corporate executives to Nazi-salute him with chants of “Profit, Profit, Profit.” The happy ending had the capitalist repenting and promising to put people ahead of profit, to clean up the environment, and to love the earth. As Dave Barry would say, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.
The Turtles are not alone, of course. There are also the Toxic Avengers, Captain Planet, and others. Toxic Avengers is most virulent in the comic-book form. The plot is familiar—our hero falls into a vat of toxic waste just as lightning hits, creating a monster who fights the evil corporation run, literally, by the Devil, which-pursuing “obscene profit”—brought the Avenger to life. As the cover of a recent issue says, “the Toxic Avenger Battles the Greediest, Evilest Conglomerate Ever—APOCALYPSE, INC!.” A cover note to parents says the comic is meant for “immature readers.” True enough, as children are taught that the eanh is being destroyed by capitalism.
Even the once-virtuous Jetsons has succumbed to the new paradigm. The original show was a paean to a free-market future, with the labor-saving devices like household robots and flying cars. But the modem movie teaches that the price of this luxury is the despoiling of a planet peopled by cute little animals. In the movie, these animals organize a revolution to overthrow their capitalist overlords, especially George Jetson’s own employer.
The message is clear-we are all rapers of Mother Earth until we give up our bourgeois lifestyles.
Groups like Action for Children’s Television, the National Council of Churches, and the national PTA have engaged in massive leftist lobbying of toy manufacturers, cartoon producers, the FCC, and Congress. As a result, the opposition of these groups, especially ACT, can cost producers a lot of money.
One supposed concern of these groups has been violence, but now it turns out that not all violence is equal. If GI Joe shoots a space alien, it’s “irredeemable.” But make the alien a toxic polluter, and that same shooting is “educational.”
In 1990, after years of lobbying, the Children’s Television Act became law. It requires stations to meet “the educational and informational needs of children” or face possible loss of their broadcast license. So we can expect to see even more anti-capitalist “educational programming” like Ted Turner’s Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Captain Planet has plenty of violence, but each story contains “real” information about an environmental issue like acid rain or toxic waste, and therefore is socially valuable according to ACT.
The anti-business propaganda on television is, of course, paid for by business. Isn’t it time that corporate America took a few days off, took a look at television’s vast anti-capitalist wasteland, and set about to clean up the toxic ideology?
