In the early morning of 6/13/08, my movie was interrupted with the unavoidable commercials. Not for beer, or cars – though it sounds like a joke told by a fifteen-year-old, my tv was offering ‘his & hers’ dildos, and personal finger massagers for women (no possibility of misunderstanding their intended use when the manufacturer is Trojan.) Competing companies offered their pills for erectile dysfunction, and another offered its capsule to enlarge the male organ. All this in one block of commercials, and the same group was repeated every ten minutes. This wasn’t the Comedy Channel (Commode TV), or Spike, where one should expect potty humor – this was AMC (American Movie Classics.)

Echoing my email inbox, my tv is very concerned about my privates. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend must be complaining – she’s probably an ex precisely because she’s so verbose about whether she’s being properly gruntled.

Appropriately, the movie being shown was The Howling, in which people who’ve been infected by werewolves become man-eating beasts themselves. In the end, even the dainty blonde anchor-woman succumbed, turning into a pretty little monster while being broadcast on live tv.

Can this be stopped? Not easily. My governor has written that the feds have complete control over the airways, and local standards are irrelevant. My congressmen have also responded, implying that they have no power over the FCC. One wonders if they will realize their potency when they discover a Trojan massager hidden in their daughter’s music box. And of course AMC is a cable/satellite channel, not broadcast over public airways, and so it’s implicit that the viewer is requesting what he gets. But suppose Charlie Wilson wasn’t a womanizer – instead of finding secret means to fight communism, might he have discovered a way to clean-up our media? Or is the FCC a front for Las Vegas mafia?

Yes, it was after-hours. But who if not teens will be the majority audience at 2 AM on a June night? It doesn’t make any difference to them whether it’s broadcast or satellite – appearance on tv gives an aura of legitimacy, normalcy to the products being pushed and the lifestyle they imply. And the advertisers are experts obligated to persuade a mainstream audience. Son, don’t let the commercials misguide you; the advertisers aren’t playing pocket-pool with you to help you with the girls – they are reaching for your wallet, and any girl you get with their pills, lotions, and appliances has an emptiness that no amount of Extenze can fill.

I would defend an adult’s right to purchase and use these products. I support the right for people to operate strip clubs, and even think it misguided that prostitution is illegal. These things are corrupt, but it’s not appropriate for one fellow to legislate another’s morality. Legalize, just don’t legitimize them, and regulate them with zoning laws. Can we not have zoning laws for tv, such that not only programming, but also advertisement is restricted to the audience with a taste for the vulgar?

One shouldn’t expect a channel offering ‘classic American movies’ to actually be a sex shop. But these commercials are pervasive. Not even the news channels will let twenty minutes go by without pushing a male potency pill. We have a choice whether to watch or not, but the choice is not whether to block a particular channel, but rather whether to watch tv at all. When AMC as a window into traditional Americana shows a couple in bed beckoning with their dildos, it’s only frustrating that the nude scenes are edited out of the movie.

Howling # 2 – a related subject

Drug companies are not our friends. They are large businesses obligated to make money for their share holders. They are not immoral, but they are driven by the profit motive, and profit is an amoral drive. It is to their advantage to promote products which treat disease, not those that cure; they advertise products which a person must take for the rest of their lives.

We have conflicting beliefs: everyone is entitled to the best possible medical care, and medical care is free enterprise. The drug companies exploit this, as they are obligated to their shareholders to do. The result is a mix of socialist and capitalist medicine – the pharmaceuticals offer their products for the greatest profit they can, and their price is obscured by government subsidy and insurance. There’s no outcry because the consumer is at best marginally aware of the full price he’s paying in taxes and insurance premiums. This is capitalist because the manufacturers set their prices as they think the market will tolerate and have patent protections, and it is socialist because we are all paying indirectly for each others’ medicines. Do you not groan on April 15 when a commercial begins, “Attention Medicare Beneficiaries”?

The drug companies try to convince us that they are our friends with the frequent promotions for their Partnership For Prescription Assistance. If that big orange bus actually exists, what real purpose might it serve outside of natural disasters? It isn’t rolling into rural America as the ally of the working man – this is pure propaganda designed to maintain the status quo of social capitalism. There’s a red star somewhere on that bus. And we are paying for its diesel fuel.

Why do drug companies advertise prescription medicine on tv if not to encourage us to put mass pressure on our doctors to give us access to their pills? “Doctor may I have some please?”

The cumulative effect of constant bombardment with drug advertisement is itself harmful to us, in more ways that I will mention. We are subject to the continuous message that the first solution to all life’s problems is a pill. Can’t sleep, can’t really awaken, memory problems, your food gives you heartburn, too little or low-quality sex – all these things can be corrected by a pill, so if life is painful or just boring it’s a small step to recreational drugs for perking things up. CNN, Fox – you’ve become drug-peddlers. Or does meteorology school actually teach forecasters to prepare the allergy reports brought to us by Allerest & Benadryl?

And of course there’s the raging competition between three or four pills for erectile dysfunction on every channel every hour of the day. Millions of men take them? Ask my doctor if I’m healthy enough for sexual activity? If I’m asking permission from my doctor, then I’m clearly not the cock of the block. I don’t know how much tax money has funded studies of how often men think about women during the day, but now my tv wants me to ponder my own genitals every ten minutes that I watch. Maybe the Immodium ads aren’t so bad.

Dear tv, it’s simple; if a product is something that can’t be discussed in the workplace without a supervisor being in jeopardy of harassment charges, then its advertisement should be blocked by the V-chip. Dear AMC – can you pretend to any sophistication in your programming when it’s only filler between sex-shop ads? Do you really want it to be mainstream for men to be womanizers and women to be voracious tramps.

So many pretty blond anchor-women. But I doubt that any of you watch your own programming because the proliferation of captions, tickers, and promos on the screen obscures your videos of airplanes coming in for belly-landings to just the tree-line on the horizon. Smoke is exciting, but one does wonder what is burning. Never were so many in such dire need of a silver bullet.