THE HUNGER GAMES ARE STILL HUNGRY
MARCH 29, 2012. Threatening box-office records, this movie about children fighting to the death, beneath the iron fist of a national dictatorship, is a page out of the propaganda op called Arrested Development.
Yes, I have a slightly different take on The Hunger Games. Beyond the setting—high-tech foppish gods imposing an impoverished agrarian economy on a kept population—the movie sells the idea that children can save the world.
Its target audience is children and the inflated egos of their parents, in this everything-is-for-the-magical-kids Boomer fantasy.
Perhaps some of you never knew a time when that fantasy wasn’t blanketing Middle Class America. But I remember things before the great change. So I can tell you “Magical Kids” is a piece of propaganda that caught hold in the late 1960s, and has evolved into a suburban religion.
Kids are now supposed to be looked at as super-precious objects who must be over-protected in every possible way—while they work astonishing miracles and rescue the planet.
The ultimate point of this op is NOT GROWING UP.
Be a kid. Stay a kid.
If you’re already unlucky enough to have become an adult, then discover how to tap into your inner child and regress.
Infantilism.
That’s the motto.
It plugs into the whole over-entitled brain-dead self-esteem movement, in which kids are told again and again how special they are, until they sink into a swamp of confusion—because they know, deep-down, that self-esteem is based on what they can actually accomplish. It’s not based on fawning adults hovering over them and trying to insert maniacally positive cliches into their little heads.
My long-time readers know I’ve presented tons of printed and spoken words on the subjects of imagination and creative power. So I’m not downplaying those forces. Not at all. I’m talking about something entirely different here.
“Only the kids can save us. The children are our future.” Special, special, special, with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
It may shock some of you to know that, in the early days of television, there were hardly any children on the screen. I recall only one such show—Howdy Doody. A puppet was run by Uncle Bob, who had a sidekick clown named Clarabelle who never spoke, just squeezed the bulb of a horn. We watched it now and then, but we were mostly outside playing games. And we didn’t identify with the kids on the screen, because, God forgive us, we wanted to grow up! What a concept.
There was no Adoration of the Kid. That came much later, when ad agencies realized children were an unexplored consumer market.
What are the oppressed adults doing in The Hunger Games? I guess they’re waiting for the kiddies to bail them out. Why haven’t they risen up en masse and fought to the death against the gods who are sacrificing their offspring in these Games? Wouldn’t you?
Here’s a shocker. Are you ready?
Kids wanting to see other kids on small screens and big screens doing amazing things is NOT a natural impulse.
That may be hard to swallow, but it’s an artificial construct that’s been sold and packaged.
The whole notion of unbelievably magical super-kids sneaked into the culture because their parents were toast at an early age. And THAT happened because those delicate parents were raised with certain cartoonish expectations that never materialized…so it had to be all about the children.
The parents were raised on the totem of consumerism: material things in endless proliferation make you happy. Material things all by themselves are transformative. Oops. That didn’t work out. Advertising, exploding in the 1960s and 70s, made the case, sold the case, and it was a dud. So what was left? A goofy ad-driven idea that kids, without lifting a finger, are automatically little gods and goddesses.
IT’S A CARTOON.
Whatever truth exists about kids with powers was defaced and wiped away by the CARTOON.
If you want to look at this like one big lab experiment, here’s the essence:
Raise a generation of kids who are taught that their Middle Class lifestyle IS the key, the salvation, the prime reality that surrounds them. Those kids grow up, and at about age 30, they’ll start to split apart like a thin porcelain vase made by an amateur. Because they don’t have anything to hold on to. What they were raised in was a bad animated movie. So now they’re depressed and confused. They get married and have kids. Now they try to infuse those little walking talking “hopes for the future” with something desperately extraordinary. With magic. The trump card of all trump cards.
Of course, childhood already has authentic magic in it. But the parents will supersede all that. They’ll shove in their cliched version of it. They’ll paint over the Van Gogh with a doofus on black velvet.
And that’s not workable. Sorry.
But the parents don’t understand that. They don’t have the background to understand it. They just keep going and wind up with the idea that children will not only do well, they’ll actually save the planet. In for a penny, in for a pound.
The secret message of The Hunger Games is: adults can’t have power, only kids can. Guess what? That’s political propaganda of a very serious kind.
And if you were trying to take over civilization and run it from a high perch (just like the elite do in the movie), selling THAT message would be a pretty good strategy, don’t you think?
And here’s another piece of the puzzle. Starting in the 1960s, psychologist-propagandists began selling the notion that parents and kids had to really get together and talk about everything. Lack of communication was horrible, and it had to be remedied. But of course, the premise was vastly over-pumped. So eventually you had parents who were letting their kids into every corner of their adult lives, and finally a perverse kind of exchange was made. The kids became adults and the adults became kids. It was and is grotesque…
…It ends with The Hunger Games… with a few kids — in a loony bin of a society, stringing bows and sharpening knives to go to war with the evil ones who are enslaving their parents — while the parents cluck helplessly from the sidelines.
I’d like to make a movie in which a special little kid is granted, magically, by the wizard president of Harvard, a PhD in psychology—and then she treats her father in an office as his therapist. The father confesses every stupid thing he’s ever done, and the kid regresses dear old dad back to age three, where, suddenly, the father refuses to budge! He wants to stay there forever. Wa-wa-wa! And the longer he stays there and acts like a three-year-old, the older his daughter becomes. She soon ends up a wise crone sorceress of 90, and he’s a squalling spoiled brat who’s hooked on marshmallows and Diet Coke. Or something.
But excuse me, I have to get back to work on my new project: re-writing Moby Dick as an animated feature, with Alvin the Chipmunk playing the White Whale and a six-year-old girl as Captain Ahab. It all takes place in rocket cars on Hollywood Boulevard. The climactic smash-up comes in a giant field where an exposition, Century of the Child, is opening. The gray-faced adults are sticking their ATM cards into machines and handing buckets of cash to their children to buy weapons of mass destruction from friendly space aliens who are here to guide the kiddies in the war to end all wars against the Snouted Oligarchs of Olympus.
Yeah, I’m making jokes about all this, but the promotion of infantilism in society is real. It’s an op, on many levels, and its objective is to weaken the foundations of a nation, until there’s nothing really left, there’s no one at home.
And again, the one big piece of the deal was selling kids on the idea that they really wanted to watch, and read about, other kids doing fantastic things. Believe me, don’t believe me, that’s nonsense. Kids want to run and play and learn and excel and become strong and grow up.
The idea that they want to remain kids forever comes later, when they look back with nostalgia on the good days—AND when “eternal children” is sold to them as a package.
Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, and creativity to audiences around the world.