Looking out: Lucrative market
By Brandon Astor Jones
Language and behaviour in the USA are in constant evolution. Alas, incredibly bad taste has become quite acceptable, even chic, in some circles.
The most recent offering from the increasingly popular Music Television Video (MTV) channel is The Beavis and Butt-head Show. Beavis and Butt-head are two totally despicable cartoon characters whose caustic attempts at humour are misogynistic and cultural attacks upon those their so-called "humour" is meant to entertain.
The woman, man or child who can find humour in The Beavis and Butt-head Show would probably find a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning entertaining too. Even their names should inspire contempt.
When you consider that it is most often adolescent viewers' pliant minds that will be negatively affected by these two cartoon characters, one wonders if MTV's search team went straight into the bowels of hell to find their program director.
So far, one youngster's death has been attributed to Beavis amd Butt-head — the child died in a fire after being encouraged by the cartoon duo to play with matches.
Moreover, some of the words the duo use to label and describe women, in or outside their cartoon world, go far beyond mere desensitivity into the realm of abject insult. For impressionable young people whose emotional development is too often threatened by a society that has become more and more callous, Beavis and Butt-head are downright dangerous.
No-one should be called a "slut", yet that is one of the many inappropriate words used by the duo. My old tattered Doubleday dictionary defines slut as "1. A slatternly woman. 2. A sexually promiscuous woman; a whore. 3. A female dog." Such words have great power to wound emotionally.
Children using such words can be incredibly cruel. My greatest fear is that this dangerous duo will make MTV so much money that television stations all over the world will want their very own regional version of their sexist and racist format.
One of my Australian friends is employed at a preschool in Sydney. A recent letter from her blossomed with excitement and delight as she revealed how "the ... kids of Vietnamese, Catonese, Japanese, Ghanaian, Anglo-Saxon [and] Aboriginal parentage all [played] together happily [and] equally". She went on to say, "It's wonderful to hear them all singing [and] understanding Japanese nursery rhymes [and] watch them listening to Aboriginal Dreamtime stories".
Before the ages of three, four and five, many children in US preschools have developed decidely sexist and racist attitudes. Those attitudes are often violently expressed in their interactions with their peers. That is especially so with a large portion of the children in Atlanta, Georgia, the 1996 Olympic site. We can be certain that the vast majority of those children have seen several Beavis and Butt-head cartoons.
Let us hope that the children of Sydney, the Olympic Games site for the year 2000, won't be yet another profit-making market for The Beavis and Butt-head Show.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]