Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial 09/15/00 IF YOU SELL IT, WE WILL COME Stop Whining. You Know We Like It. Sometimes advertising works, sometimes it doesn't. Wanted posters with my picture on them plastered all over Panama City a dozen years ago didn't work, mainly because most people were fed up with the Noriega dictatorship but partly because it was a lousy photo. I could have been Bigfoot for all anyone knew. Advertising slogans spread across the outfield wall at Latin American Stadium in Havana don't work. The last time I was there, I pointed to one billboard through blue-gray clouds of fragrent cigar smoke. It said "Sociolismo o muerte"--socialism or death. My Cuban companion whispered "We keep wondering if it's multiple choice." Compare that with Christina Aguilera writhing her tiny hips in a Gap ad. Or Britany Spears performing a soft-core strip tease at the MTV Music Awards. Or steroid-bulging wrestlers pummeling each other with chairs in an ad for WWF Smackdown. Or rapper Nelly in his Billboard number one CD Country Grammar rhapsodizing about driving down the streets of St. Louis smoking a Phillies Blunt packed with marijuana while keeping a finger on the trigger of his Street Sweeper. A Street Sweeper, for the uninitiated, is a handy bit of South African firepower designed to fire alternate large-caliber rounds of solid slugs, shrapnel, gas, and explosives. It can turn human flesh into dime-sized nuggets of quivering protoplasm. I've seen it work. A couple of decades of free-marketeers running things in corporate America and in government have given us a pop culture soaked in sex and violence. And why not? Since the Age of Reagan, the mantra has been "Let the market decide." We are the market. We've decided. Seven of the top ten shows on cable TV are unltra-violent pro wrestling. The big TV hit of the summer, Survivor, celebrated the screw-you-every-man-for-himself ethic. Barely post-pubescent eye candy like Spears and Aguilera enthrall legions of young female fans by singing of love and heartbreak while grinding like jail bait strippers. Nelly and Emenem hook in millions of young male fans with songs about violence, rape, drugs, and sexual conquest. The most profitable media company in North America is the National Enquirer. The men and women behind these products have all the moral sense of Josef Mengele, but they're as astute as Milton Friedman when it comes to knowing the customer. We want it. We buy it. And we make media magnates like Michael Eisner, Mel Karmazin, Vince McMahon, and Russell Simmons breathtakingly rich, rewarding them for knowing our tastes better than we do. We know the rhetoric. What's the reality? The reality is Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman can rip the moral amoeba who run America's media conglomorates Wednesday morning, and Wednesday night Al Gore's at a fund-raiser sponsored by Miramax studios. The reality is sleek white suburbanites can cluck their tongues while their kids are cruising with the bass on the "Dislocate Internal Organs" pre-set, listening to drug-and-violence soaked hip-hop. The reality is poverty-racked black neighborhoods gorged on drugs and violence willingly turn over precious disposable income to TV, stereo, and hip hop clothing dealers. The reality is that radio and TV would runs ads for cocaine if it was legal, and movie studios would create trailers glorifying riutal murder if they could just get past those pesky homicide statutes. It's simply the mass market at work. The Girl Scouts come out with a study concluding girls of eight and ten are feeling pressure to experiment with their sexuality because of a pop culture that smacks them in the face with sexually-charged images and ads. The FTC reveals that movie studio internal documents describe plots to market violent and sexual material to 12 year olds. Every parent knows the thrill of combining hormore turbocharged adolesence with ads where violence and sex peddle consumer goods. It's amusing to listen to the anti-government pro-business crowd squawk about how maybe we should reconsider having some sort of tighter government regulation of what gets spread across our car speakers, entertainment centers, and movie screens. Psst, guys. Too late. We have decided, as consumers, that we will purchase products with sexual and violent themes. Marketers know this. The best solution is to take after the corporations themselves. Protests and boycotts stir up a lot of yack-yack on talk radio, but they hardly ever achieve their objectives. Herewith, a modest proposal. Change the tax code. Eliminate the deduction for advertsing for large companies. If, say, your corporation has a net profit of blah-blah million dollars, or if it has a net worth of umpty-ump billion dollars, then it can no longer deduct one penny of its advertising costs. Imagine, if you will, the terror in corner offices when the radio and TV spots, the movie placement, the slick magazine ads, the record store end-caps and cutouts, the house party give-aways, the cineplex trailers all suddenly become non-deductable. Do you want mass culture companies to stop poisoning your kids? Then stop letting them write it off their taxes. Join the discussion

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