PETA, Porn, and Postman

In an AP press release today PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals) states that it is about to launch a porn website to help promote their animal rights activism and vegan agendas.  Neil Postman is cheering from the grave because I believe this step, in and of itself, finally, and without question, proves that we, as a society, are actually Amusing Ourselves to Death!

Is This Over the Top?

Postman’s thesis in his seminal 1985 critique of media in America was that rights are exchanged for entertainment (sounds a little biblical doesn’t it?  Check out the story in Genesis chapter 25) or, in more technical terms, “form excludes content.”  Postman’s ideas were first presented in a talk given in 1984 on Orwell’s book of the same name. However, Postman stated then that contemporary culture was better represented by Huxley’s work Brave New World where the public was addicted to amusement.

It appears now that PETA has gone beyond the Brave New World to just plain stupidity.  PETA spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt says “a pornographic site will allow PETA to reach a broader audience.”  Really? I have found that pornography has always supplemented my ethical arguments. We might wonder why God tell Moses to have the women of Israel strip-tease at the foot of Mt Sinai when he revealed the Ten Commandments.  Obviously, Israel would have taken the Law to heart if there would have been nudity involved!!

            Should this be considered entrapment in reverse…or just stupidity?  I can see someone surfing the net for porn, (and unfortunately having no trouble finding it)---click the link for “FREE PORN”--but when they get to the site they are forced to watch a “commercial” about animal rights…and then…FREE PORN!!!  Really?  I guess each time I speak I will offer everyone whiskey and cigarettes…if we have to hear alleged “truth” we might as well have a good time doing it!

It’s not the first time something like this has happened of course. But it may be one of the most extreme cases in recent years. Are we so starved for anything “free” (I’ll argue that enslavement to sexual sin is never free!) that this would actually work.  The mindset that all entertainment is reality and that we are entitled to have our “piece of the pie” (BTW…a Yahoo headline declared this week that former president Clinton had announced that the concept of “The American Dream” has been under attack for more than 20 years—it is HARD to get anything past Bill…unless of course it is an intern with a cigar fetish!) is truly causing us to “amuse ourselves to death.”

Beyond the obvious are the underlying absurdities of such a move that MAY just allow this stupidity to pass.  In a telling 2006 article about the death postmodernity, Alan Kirby says that the death of postmodernity ushers in “pseudo-modernity” which feeds on the social sciences and escapism:

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterizes the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.

If Kirby is right then PETA is also right…and, unfortunately, their all too pragmatic approach to selling animal rights, via free porn, will garner them a broader “fan-base” which will boost the number of people receiving their message, that may ultimately garner them future support for their agenda…it really is a Brave New World…I am just glad it is not my home.