For any of you out there who have read Huxley's Brave New World or practically anything by Karl Marx, this harmless little children's book should send shivers up your spine. It's for real, kiddos; I picked up a copy with speechless incredulity at Our Lady of Barnes & Noble a few days ago, flipping through its propaganda-laden pages unable to laugh or cry.The premise of this capitalistic pamphlet involves Santa, the greatest of all symbols of American materialism and greed, teaching the merits of the assembly line method of production to Henry Ford, the greatest of all symbols of capitalism's soulless industrialization and dehumanization of the worker, to increase the elves' (the North Pole proletariat) rate of production, enabling them to make more toys even faster! How long until the facts of religion and of history are obliterated completely by harmless children's stories such as these? Who needs Christmas when American consumerism can forge its own legends and meanings for December 25?
Good God, people.
"Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't." - Mustapha Mond in Brave New World
5 comments:
WTF? Who are all you spam bloggers?!
What are you talking about, soulless? This story would warm the cockles of my capitalistic heart! I'm kidding, sort of. I am decidedly against feeding any sort of propaganda, as this clearly is, to children. Still and all, when you come to the point about wiping out religion and dehumanizing people, I think Karl Marx is a whole lot guiltier than that other white-bearded guy associated with the color red.
Check out I found the other day. Whatever your political leanings, you have to admit, this is creepy! Especially note the sample pages...
Uh, that link went haywire and ate my whole paragraph. Well, you get the point.
My God, that is creepy. Forget why Mommy is a Democrat; why is she a lesbian squirrel?!
And Karl might have said that religion was "the opium of the masses," but he was referring to the current 'type' of popular religion, that materialistic, hyper-marketed, super-church spawning, Jesus bumper sticker promoting kind of religion. The religion of the almighty dollar. Go to your local Baptist or Methodist Church on Sunday morning and count the number of Lexuses and Mercedes Benzes in the parking lot, if you don't believe me. We're a people of faith in selflessness and the righteousness of the poor, yet we have loads and loads of cash. Non sequitur? Jesus might say so...
Those are the scariest books I have seen in a while. Indoctrination at such a young age! For Shame!!! And if Squirrel's are Democrats, what are Marxists? Chinchillas?-looks soft and cuddly but can de-bone your hand in seconds. Keep waging the good fight for a true Christmas, Bibb!
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