Turn Off Your TV--Part 12 MTV Is the Church of Satan by L. Wolfe There's no need to remind you to turn off your television. From what we have told you so far, you know it is impossible to follow what we are about to say if you have your television on. But I want to add a new precondition: I want you to turn off your radio, especially if there is popular music on. In this section, we are going to discuss the relationship of music, in particular popular music, to your brainwashing by television. You are going to need your head clear of all background noise, so that you might concentrate on what we are going to present and reflect on it. So turn off the radio also. Over the last forty years, {television} has helped organize popular culture into a {Satanic cult} whose values are the direct counter-position to Judeo-Christian morality. Man is distinguished from the animal by the fact that he is made in the image of his Creator, the living God, and that each human being has been given by the Creator a divine spark of reason, enabling us to carry out God's will. To the extent that we act toward our fellow men through the wisdom of morally informed reason, we act more like humans, less like animals. Society is now organized around a popular culture dominated by Freud's god of Eros and the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure as a goal in itself. Reason and beauty have given way to mass celebrations of ugliness and anarchistic infantilism. We have lost our ability to love other human beings, in the Christian sense of the word, {agape@am}. At the current epicenter of this mass hedonistic culture is what the political leader Lyndon LaRouche has called the ``one-eyed church of Satan''--music Television Networks or, as it is more commonly known, MTV. It bleats out a non-stop, 24-hour message of sex, violence, and hedonism to a daily cable television audience of more than {25 million} people in the United States alone. Starting out 11 years ago, MTV has now become a total expression of youth popular culture, featuring its own news programming, pop culture news, a fashion show, a comedy hour, and its rock music video segments for every perverted taste. It has branched out to a second channel, VH-1, which features music videos designed for the ``older folks,'' the 25-50 year olds, with a special emphasis on ``oldies''--songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, MTV music video spinoffs proliferate on network television. In less than a decade, MTV has ``hooked'' America, especially its youth. Through the power of television, MTV's values and methods have infected {all} aspects of American popular culture. The music video is now the standard form of television advertising, with the images and sounds tailored to fit individual products; news shows have ``music video'' sequences; sports shows and sporting events use music videos; almost all television now employs what producers call ``MTV production values,'' incorporating one or another form of MTV ``music'' into their shows. Thus, {the anti-Christian youth culture as depicted by MTV has become the dominant cultural force of the late twentieth century}. In this section of our report, we are going to try to explain in more detail how that happened in the course of the last three or so generations, before giving a more detailed look at the MTV evil web itself. Evil Reaches Out On Oct. 3, 1992, Irish rock singer Sinead O'Connor appeared on national network television on NBC's {Saturday Night Live.} In the middle of a live version of her a cappella song, ``War,'' the singer, known for her shaved head and shrill voice, displayed an 8 inch by 12 inch color photo of Pope John Paul II; shouting ``Fight the real enemy,'' she methodically ripped up the picture of the Pontiff. Within minutes, NBC was flooded with more than 500 phone calls expressing outrage at what had happened. The next day, Catholic leaders and others announced a boycott of O'Connor's records, including the new song ``War,'' which had already been made into a music video, without the open attack on the Holy Father. But, over at MTV, there was no boycott of O'Connor. MTV's ``news'' discussed the furor and indicated that O'Connor's millions of fans worldwide would hardly bat an eyelash or drop a nose-earring at her behavior. Said one youth interviewed on a local television news program, ``It's a free country. She's an artist. She has a right to express herself anyway she sees fit.'' So far, O'Connor's record company reports that her sales remain steady. They don't expect them to change. The power of the one-eyed church of Satan, MTV, now openly challenges the Church and all religion. Reaching more than 50 million homes through cable networks in the U.S.A. and another 200 million in 70 countries on five continents, it offers preachers like Sinead O'Connor a means to reach their youthful flock. As shocking as O'Connor's behavior was on national television, it is mild fare for MTV. For example, a performer of the genre called ``dark metal,'' which routinely features Satanic symbols such as upside-down crosses and skulls in their videos, as well as anti-clerical, anti-Christian lyrics, by Glenn Danzig, has what the {New York Times} describes as ``scholarly interest in the problem of evil: If there is a loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God, why does He allow so much pain and suffering?'' According to {The Times}, ``Mr. Danzig has said that he perceives church and state as evils that have co-opted the image of righteousness. If church and government are good, Mr. Danzig seems to say in his songs, he is more than willing to be branded as evil.'' Danzig and his group of the same name are among numerous MTV-featured groups and artists, like Sinead O'Connor, who actively seek the destruction of the Church and all organized religion as a precondition for a new, society based on a {Satanic}, anti-Christian order--the so-called ``New Age.'' His group's second album, titled ``Lucifuge'' featured a song titled, ``Snakes of Christ.'' Religion itself is corruption that man must reject, screams the vile Danzig, accompanied with appropriate video imagery: ``Serpents of the Lord crawling to the will of God/ Serpents of your Lord crawling, all evil.'' {The Times}, the newspaper of record for the Eastern Establishment, elevates this evil to ``high art.'' In its erudite ``criticism'' of MTV culture, {The Times} terms such songs as Danzig's ``thought provoking'' and his album assault on religion as ``one of the most accomplished and absorbing rock albums of the year. ``The darkness in the music holds up a mirror to the darkness in society--the empty pieties and alienating double-speak of politicians and self appointed spiritual guardians,'' wrote {Times }critic Jon Pareles. ``The best dark metal bands may be an anathema in some quarters. But there can be no question of their artistic intent.'' To attack God as evil, to preach for the destruction of religion and the ``false'' moral values of Judeo-Christian civilization, is both the implicit and explicit content and intent of MTV brainwashing. That is what is being ``blessed'' by the Establishment through its mouthpiece {The New York Times} and countless other media outlets that have given their blessing to what is known as ``the MTV experience.'' This is the network that has entrapped your kids. But before it entrapped them, this web of evil snared {you}. And that is an important point to remember, because if you, the adult population of America, were not brainwashed, there would be no way to successfully recruit your children to the evil that MTV preaches, no matter how many powerful people support it or what the media says about it. The Freudian Paradigm Shift In a previous section of this report, we referred to what your brainwashers call a {paradigm shift}--the changing of sets of beliefs and values that govern society. We explained that such {paradigm shifts} do not occur overnight, but take place across several generations. One marker for this change in social paradigms are the values embodied in popular youth culture. One's moral outlook or social conscience (what Freudians call the {super-ego}) is shaped by youthful experience. It is assimilated, learned from one's family members and from the institutions, such as the church and schools, that act as parental surrogates. If you want to shift social values, then it is easier to do so by targetting youth, {before} those values are reinforced by the society as a whole. That is precisely what is being done with MTV. The brainwashers of your children have set up a counter-institution, that preaches values contrary to those of the church and society as a whole. But for such an effort to be successful, they must neutralize the positive influence of parents and church and schools, or at least weaken such influences. For the last 40 years, as we have explained, the principal vehicle for mass brainwashing has been {your television set}. Television, through its open promotion of {rock music} and the sick culture that surrounds it, was the major recruiter for the youth counterculture; those who were not active participants or even offered nominal opposition, nonetheless participated {vicariously} in the mass brainwashing experience by watching television in that period. Thus your toleration of the rock-drug-sex counterculture, in television programming, has weakened your ability to influence your children. This is what ``opened the door'' for MTV. The Power of Music Since the advent of moving picture technology and sound recording technology, the mass brainwashers have organized popular youth culture around movies and music, especially as disseminated by radio, television and films. Music, in its classical form, has the power to bring the human soul into a reasoned dialogue with the laws of the universe. Contrary to popular opinion, the great classical music of a Mozart or a Beethoven is not an act of mystical and unknowable genius, but the product of a scientifically discoverable method which can be taught and reproduced. As such, great classical music is a celebration of that which is most human about man, that which is most connected to the divine spark given him by the Creator. Romantic or other forms of banal music appeal to the emotions, and seek to have one's emotions dominate the intellect and reason. Romantic music degrades man, reduces him to a more bestial state. Freud, who saw man as an animal, understood the power of music to manipulate men into acting like animals. Implicitly recognizing its connection to brainwashing, he stated that music plays upon ``the instrument of the soul,'' in much the same way that his psychoanalysis did. He and neo-Freudians also saw the special power of {romantic} music, either in the form of Wagnerian pieces in ``high culture'' or more banal popular songs, to appeal in a most direct fashion to that which is {most infantile and animal-like} in man, what they called the {it} or the {id}. Several Freudians even studied the effects of this so-called music on ``primitive people,'' observing that it drove them into a frenzy, unleashing orgies of sex and even blood sacrifice. This, they said, proves the power of musical sounds to unleash man from his inhibitions, from the control of his moral conscience, {super-ego}. This ``freedom'' returns man to a natural state, and, they observed, if properly regulated, can remove him from the hold of false ideology and prohibtions created by western Judeo-Christian religious teachings. The evil witch, Margaret Mead, and other so-called social anthropologists, further observed the relation of drugs in primitive culture to music; such natural hallucinogens as peyote ``enhanced'' wild, uninhibited behavior. It is around these studies and observations that the rock-drug-sex counterculture was hatched by the networks associated with the Frankfurt School and the Tavistock Institute. We explained previously how images and messages in television shows watched by young people are {played back} in behavior later in life. Several studies have been done that show that a song or piece of music associated with one's childhood, when heard later in life, can call forth memories and associations of that earlier period. This is the marketing appeal of what MTV and radio stations call ``classic oldies,'' songs from 15-25 years ago which are targetted at the adult population. Popular music {encodes} memories in the listener that are recalled by hearing the same piece of music, thereby triggering {an infantile emotional state}. Think for a moment and you'll see what I am saying is true. If you are in your 40s, then you had vivid memories of the 1960s, most of which are associated with the youth culture of the day. When you hear a song by the Beatles from that period, or the Rolling Stones, or the Beach Boys, what happens? You have an emotional {flashback}. A feeling state is induced that brings you back to that time. Let's give a more precise example. You are walking in a store with piped-in rock music. All of a sudden, a song from the sixties comes across the music speakers: ``Sweet Judy Blue Eyes'' by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Your mind drifts back to that time, now more than 20 years ago. You start free associating, remembering a girl that you were with and a time when youthful hormones were running a bit out of control. The song lasts only a few minutes and the whole experience seems to pass without anything but a warm memory of some distant time and place. But then, without even realizing it, you start looking with a strange look and even stranger feeling at some of the young girls passing by. You are {fantasizing}, in a sort of {day-dream}. Your mind has been brought back to the {infantile emotional state of 20 years ago!} Just by hearing a certain song. Be honest now: Hasn't something like this ever happened to you? The more frequently you hear this ``golden oldies'' music, the more time you spend fantasizing, the more you tend to live in an infantile feeling state, in a sort of emotional time warp. During the height of the counterculture, it was estimated that more than 50 million Americans experimented with drugs of all kinds, the majority between the ages 10-25 years old. Much of that drug usage was associated with the performance of or listening to rock music. Not surprisingly, recent studies reveal that the playing of those 1960s-1970s rock songs today can {bring back memories of drug experience} for large numbers of older Americans; in the most extreme cases, usually involving people who heavily used psychedelic drugs such as LSD or mescaline, hearing certain rock songs can cause {drug flashbacks}, identical to or mirroring the drug experiences themselves. On the surface, this may not seem to effect individual daily behavior. However, it establishes an emotional tie between the ``baby boomer'' generation and their {infantile and irrational} past. It makes the adult population in general more tolerant of the MTV generation and its cultural habits. ``Hey, you guys have your music,'' says the MTV addict to his ``golden oldies'|'' parent, not seeing any reason why he or she should not be allowed to have ``theirs.'' Over the last 40 years, television brainwashing has so weakened the moral stamina of each succeeding adult generation, that each has been incapable of passing on the values of western Judeo-Christian civilization to their children. Instead, social values are transmitted through surrogate authorities, as they appear in the popular culture on television. The brainwashers who ultimately control the content of television programming have made sure that it {maintains} several generations in their moral imbecility and infantilism. There has been a recent rash of nostalgia programming, appealing to the infantile baby boomer; such programs feature the popular music of the period. This programming both establishes and then reinforces the {emotional authority} of MTV, creating the climate for its acceptance by our multi-generational, infantile youth culture. MTV returns the favor by continuing the pattern of television addiction for new generations of youth. And the doors to this church of Satan are always open, non-stop 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The Assault on Reason Imagine yourself sitting alone in a semi-darkened room. In front of you is a television set, with MTV programming turned on. There are bright colors, flashes of light, dream-like images blending into one another, all accompanied by loud sounds of amplified, electronic rock music. As the images flash, there is a steady, driving, pulse-like beat to the music. Then suddenly, there is silence. The images stop flashing, and the voice of an announcer comes on. It is just his face on the screen, then it dissolves. A pulsing, loud noise rises in the background, as his voice is overwhelmned by the sound of the next ``song.'' More and even louder noises, more bright colors, flashes of light and images, ultimately dissolving into the gaze of the so-called artist. A pulsing beat accompanies the images, which rapidly change and again dissolve into the gaze of the artist, apparently mouthing the lyrics. Within four minutes or so, this next segment is over, and there is another, brief moment of silence. Then, within a few seconds, the process begins all over again. This cycle of lights, colors, and noise is repeated in segments of approximately four minutes each; the four-minute segments meld into a longer sequence of multiple segments varying between 16 and 30 minutes. The sequences are broken only for commercial messages, which are almost impossible to distinguish from the musical segments. As you continue to watch, you find yourself unaware of anything outside the images and sounds emanating from the set. You lose your sense of time and develop a sensation of being {inside} what is being projected on the screen. Your mind is completely ``turned on'' to the sensations coming from the screen. You {feel} a sense of excitation, eagerly awaiting the next audiovisual assault on your senses. When the set is finally turned off, {the music and images keep replaying in your mind}. For the first few moments after such an experience of a moderate duration is over, you feel confused and disoriented. It is hard to concentrate on anything and even harder to pay attention to a complicated discussion. You find yourself, {unconsciously}, humming one of the songs you heard; as you do, some of the images are recalled. This is what watching MTV does to your mind; it is even worse for younger, more impressionable minds, who have been brought up on television. Over time, with habituated MTV viewing, one's attention span {will tend to collapse into the ``four minute'' segment of the music video}. {All} television, if habitually viewed over a long period of time is cognitively destructive. The visual image tends to shut down the central nervous functions asssociated with human reason, as the brainwasher Fred Emery remarked twenty years ago. Emery stated that there was a simple way to ``detox'' from such a state: Stay away from television for a few days. But Emery wrote before the era of MTV. The MTV format induces a hypnotic trance-like state in its habituated viewers, it becomes much more difficult to ``turn off;'' add to that, the {playback} effects--the images and videos--playing back in one's head, even while the set is off, and you have created one of the most mind-numbing tools for mass brainwashing. The brainwashers realize the power of MTV. In a book on MTV, titled {Rock Around the Clock,} by E. Ann Kaplan, the director of something called the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, writes that MTV ``hynotizes more than other [television] because it consists of a series of short texts that maintain us in an excited state of expectation.... We are trapped by the constant hope that the next video will finally satisfy, and lured by the seductive promise of immediate plentitude, we keep endlessly consuming the short texts. MTV thus carries to an extreme a phenomenon that characterizes most of television....'' Kaplan, using the terminology of the Frankfurt School's philosophers who speak of ``a postmodernist outlook,'' says that MTV viewing produces a ``decentering experience'' which challenges normative values as they are logically represented by moral social conscience. MTV, she says, has no single point of view, no philosophy, only a negation of reason as its outlook, in favor of expressions of ``desires, fantasies and anxieties,'' which she calls a ``postmodern'' consciousness. Kaplan indicates that the willingness to accept heavy doses of sex and violence in music videos is reflective of the power of the medium presenting them. By overwhelming reason with audiovisual sensations, there can be no ``reality check,'' no effort to separate the experience from reality. The habituated viewer of MTV becomes a mental captive, a prisoner of the non-rational, animal-like world being presented in the music videos. Using a metaphor from Michel Foucault's {Panopticon,} Kaplan supports the observation that watching television, and especially MTV, is the equivalent of being an observed prisoner. The brainwashed viewer has only an illusion that he controls his choices, which are in fact fed to him, 24 hours a day, by those who observe his behavior--the programmers of MTV. They profile viewer responses through polls, and adjust the programming to increase the brainwashing effect. MTV, Kaplan remarks, is built upon ``an ever increasing knowledge of psychological manipulation.'' The combination of {sound} and {video} image by MTV is an effort to abort reasoned thought by appealing directly to the sensory apparatus. The music video represents a mode of {literal, non-thinking} that substitutes for thought {perception and sensation}. For the four minutes of the music video, an artificial reality is created, much like that of a drug-experience. Freud and the brainwashers that have followed him understood the power of music to reach directly into the emotion. However, music, even the most romantic music, in and of itself is not {literal}. It requires some cognitive activity to {relate} the sounds and words to thought-objects. The combination of music with images, however, helps to {short-circuit any thought} by providing a literal representation of the musical message. The majority of music videos do not lend themselves to rational analysis. That is intentional: They are operating on the {emotional level}. In that state, the dissociative power of television comes into play. Habituated viewing produces a trance-like stare, through which one {receives} messages and images without question. Under normal social conditions, a youngster, especially one brought up in a family steeped in the moral values of Judeo-Christian civilization, might recoil at the vulgar and licentious actions of rock stars, both men and women, as they are depicted in the videos. One's first reaction would be to turn one's eyes away or to cover them. But when this material is presented on MTV, the aberrant behavior is not questioned by its young audience. The viewer, in his or her trance-like state, receives the images and accompanying sound without a sense of shame. There is no time for reflection, no time for thought, as the perceptions overwhelm the senses. {Where there is no reason, there can be no morality}. In the terminology of Freudian mass brainwashing, the viewer of a music video is in an induced state most resembling a {dream}. He is ``helped'' or coaxed into this state through the repetitive flashing of colors and images, overwhelming the visual apparatus, while the pulsing, throbbing of the rock beat, has a similar effect on the auditory apparatus. In this dream-like state, the moral conscience, or in Freudian terms, the {super-ego}, is pushed aside and there is direct access to the most infantile emotions of the {id}. Anti-social rage and erotic desires, kept in check by one's moral conscience, can now be brought to the surface. The connection made between the viewer and music video, in terms of Freudian brainwashing, is that of a {wish fulfillment}, an expression of the {desires of the infantile id} to express itself, without the constraint of social conscience. What is left from this experience, especially if it is repeated many times, is a sense of anxiety and conflict between {reality} and the {images} in the music video. This creates a {moral confusion}, especially in young viewers whose conscience lacks both development and strength. It produces a {moodiness} that further increases a tendency to non-rational emotional responses to situations of everyday life. Does the viewer of a music video {understand} what he has seen? Not really, because understanding is a function of reason. The emotions cannot {understand}, they can only {react}. Studies of MTV viewers have found that they can recall only certain grotesque images, and some striking phrases that may accompany them. They cannot recall whole songs, but can remember rhythms and beats. These same studies also show that while they cannot {explain} the content of a music video, they can describe {strong feelings} that they associate with it. It has been noted that playing a given song without the video images can cause an habituated viewer to replay those images from the music video, as if on a slide screen in the mind. There is no flow, no continuity, in the images: It is as if they were mental snapshots, associated with particular sounds, which in turn are associated with particular feelings. Brainwashers would say that the {visual images have been imprinted on the memory}; they are {encoded} by the {sounds}. When those sounds are played, even in the absence of the images, the images are {played back}, reproducing the sense of being enveloped in the music video experience. This is how your children are being programmed. The more someone watches MTV, the more one will tend to ``think'' with this emotional imagery. The former student leftist and current social critic, Todd Gitlin, now a professor of sociology at Berkeley, told {Time} magazine, that MTV has ``accelerated the process by which people are more likely to think in images than logic.'' Those who created MTV were quite conscious of this effect. Robert Pittman, the person who is given most credit for its creation and operated MTV until 1986, stated: ``What we have introduced with MTV is a non-narrative form. As opposed to conventional television, where you rely on plot and continuity, we rely on mood and emotion. We make you feel a certain way as opposed to walking away with any particular knowledge.'' The TV-reared generations, says Pittman, form their impressions of things from {images} and {pictures} and not from words. Pittman saw MTV as establishing a new form of consciousness, the type of mental dissociation that the brainwasher Fred Emery identifies as the ``The Clockwork Orange'' paradigm: ``You're dealing with a culture of TV babies.... What the kids can't do today is follow things for too long. They get bored and distracted, their minds wander. If information is presented to them in tight fragments that don't necessarily follow each other, kids can comprehend that.'' ``Image is everything,'' says the punk tennis superstar Andre Agassi, in a camera commercial made with music video production values. And, concentration, reason and morality are out the window. They Look So Bad If there is one thing that truly marks the youth culture of MTV it is {ugliness}. Have you taken a good look at your kids or their friends lately? Maybe you should keep your eyes open when you walk around the malls. The first thing you notice are the weird hairdos, often done at beauty parlors that specialize in what is called ``rock and roll hair'' or that ``MTV look.'' It looks like their heads have been stuck into an electric outlet and then placed in a vat of brightly colored printers' ink. And the clothes: tightly fitting, but sparsely covering garments, with bright colors and rips. They frequently wear the skins of animals, such as snakes, lizards and cows. Occasionally, they wear what appears to be underwear as their outer garments, parading around in leather bras and the like. And they wear so much jewelry and so many chains that one might think that they need to lift weights to be able to carry it all. This extreme taste has infected even the so-called high fashion houses of Paris and New York. It is common to see such styles in clothing being shown by the glitzy design houses, draped over the highest priced models. Ugliness is the ``in thing.'' MTV now has its own fashion show, {The House of Style,} which, typical of MTV format, has no scheduled time slot and is shown at random with approximately six different shows a year. Its host is supermodel Cindy Crawford, and covers the fashion scene with a non-stop MTV soundtrack, wild color, and fast cuts and wide camera angles. Fitting the MTV version of the ``counterculture,'' the show stays away from the normal fashion glitz of Paris, etc. to feature lower priced ``in'' clothes, celebrity interviews, and discussions with younger designers. Those of us old enough to have memories of the 1960s or earlier might see nothing too odd about what is happening. After all, popular performers have always seemed to establish fashion trends. But those who control our brainwashing and the mass brainwashing of our youth through the MTV experience have noted a difference. {The New York Times} style section remarked recently that ``MTV videos have made musicians more conscious of their images and have trained audiences to expect a new look every album.'' MTV and its ``artists'' have usurped ``the vacuum of authority'' in setting style trends for the masses. This is especially true in the volatile children's clothing market. ``Rock video is driving the children's market right now,'' said J.C. Penney's children's fashion adviser. ``Whatever the rock stars are wearing, kids are trying to emulate them.'' And that includes very young children. ``Preschool children know fashion,'' said another department store official. ``They are exposed to MTV and Madonna even before they can walk and talk.'' Citing the power of MTV and its superstars to create style, Elizabeth Saltzman, the fashion editor of {Vogue} told {The Times}, ``It's not like wearing underwear outside your clothes was the next thing. Madonna made it happen.'' When Madonna ended her 1986 tour in New York, Macy's sold out of such garments, all licensed by the ``Material Girl,'' in two days. And MTV, in the 1980s, ``made'' Madonna, as it made numerous other people popular stars through its mass exposure. In a certain sense, MTV functions like all advertising does to attract consumers to a product. Its music videos, seen from that perspective, are self-promotions, created at a cost of anywhere from $35,000 on up by recording companies to sell, in the last decade, first albums (vinyl) and audio cassette tapes and then CDs and video cassettes. According to the format, a popular video, slated for heavy play, will run as many as 4-7 times a day, depending on its slot; less heavily played videos, or ones from newer artists being ``broken in'' will run four or more times in a week. They are kept in the ``rotation'' usually for at least a month cycle. There can be no doubt that as an advertising medium MTV is one of the most successful in history. At the point of its creation in 1981 by a subsidiary of Warner Communications, Warner Amex Cable (it has since been sold to the huge media conglomerate, Viacom, which in turn has been taken over by the billionaire, Sumner Redstone), all record sales were in doldrums. MTV, in the words of one record industry executive, ``saved our ass.'' It returned the ``single'' or the pop hit song to its former role as the major means of marketing other recording products, giving it a prominence that it hadn't had since the days of the old {American Bandstand} (now itself a video rock show). People who focus on its effect on the multibillion recording industry, are taking a far too narrow view of MTV as an advertising medium. It has {sold American youth on a new level of degenerate culture, while crippling their powers of reason}. Freud's nephew Eduard Bernays was one of the first people to apply his uncle's mass brainwashing principles to advertising. In his early writings, Bernays indicates that the best advertising appeals ``above the mind,'' directly to emotions and instincts. Such appeals bypass rational thought and work on {unconscious desires}, especially {infantile} associations involving sex and power, for example. Bernays ushered in an age of psychologically sophisticated advertising featuring movie stars and other beautiful people to induce target audiences to {copy} what they {perceived} to be emotionally desirable behavior. MTV carries this mode of brainwashing to new technological levels. Its audience is already in a trance-like, non-critical state, ready to receive copyable images. MTV's effectiveness can be measured by how much your son might resemble the lead singer in Megadeath or your daughter looks like Madonna. Behavior Modification Beyond the sales of black leather panties, garter belts or leather bras, or ripped tee-shirts, MTV also sells {patterns of asocial, non-rational behavior}, for consumption by our young people. Writing in the 1950s, Dr. Frederic Wertham, one of the first people to warn of the destructive power of television programming on the minds of young people, described how the young mind accepts {images} of behavior obtained from sources outside the family and social institutions like the church. Dr. Wertham waged war against the comic book industry and later, television, because they presented young people with violent and other non-rational, emotionally based solutions to problems. Dr. Wertham explained that it is impossible to statistically correlate any one to one relationship between an image in a comic book and the violent act of a teenager, as some people have tried to do. The mind, he said, does not work so simply. For example, the image of a colorfully presented comic book character beating someone with a lead pipe will stay buried within a person's memory. It is recalled in a stressful situation, such as a street fight, in which the emotions involved with the comic book representation, in this case rage, are also present. Under such circumstances, the young person will {copy} what is in the comic book, picking up a a lead pipe and beating someone to death. The courts and others may never see the connection, Dr. Wertham says, but it is the role of adult society to make sure that such images are not transmitted, uncritically, to the impressionable minds of our youth. With MTV, {the presentation of the images itself is addicting}. The most important product being advertised and consumed is the television brainwashing itself. Kaplan, in her previously cited work, says that all television and MTV in particular is ``seductive precisely because it speaks to a desire that is insatiable,'' promising fulfillment of that desire in ``some far distant and never to be experienced future. TV's strategy is to keep us endlessly consuming in the hopes of fulfilling our desires.'' In the case of MTV, its self-promotion feeds on the infantile desire to possess objects. Its former advertising slogan, popularized internationally, is the scream of an infant for its mother or surrogate, ``I want my MTV.'' Another of its self-promotions shows an image reference to Aztec temples, then shows the MTV logo toppling those temples. In that way, MTV announces itself as the new heir to the Aztec culture--a culture based upon bloody human sacrifice that saw no value in human life. Dr. Wertham, in one of his many cogent clinical observations, based on case studies, noted that habituated comic book reading had prepared a whole generation to accept the non-reasoning, often violent fare of television. He observed that {all} comic books, with their emphasis on {imagery}, presented in colorful ways that were attractive to young minds, discouraged creative reasoning. Even more important, Dr. Wertham countered some of the arguments that were made by the comics industry and its defenders that they were getting people who would otherwise not do so, to ``read.'' Comic books created mental barriers to reading, preventing children from developing a mastery of language and the ambiguity contained in great literature and poetry precisely because words were associated with their pictures. The mind, he said, was being turned off and the emotions turned on. Comic book readers, he said, were not reading because they were not thinking: they were merely passively looking at pictures, with silly dialogue. He disputed classical Freudians who claimed that a young child's personality was set in stone by Oedipal developments between the ages three and five. Dr. Wertham asserted that the cornerstone of man's identity is his moral conscience and that this is shaped by young children's interaction with society. It is something that is learned and to learn it one must be able to think. Comic books were thus making America immoral; later he was to say the same about television and its programming. For the purposes of this report, let's concentrate on one aspect of Dr. Wertham's observations. To get someone to accept MTV programming, there must be a certain {preconditioning} that takes place. Some of that preconditioning is obvious. MTV is a television event, thus the general acceptance by adult society of television helps prepare a child to accept ``the MTV experience.'' Then, there is the pervasive effect of the counterculture and its music on society; rock and similar music is everywhere, so why shouldn't there be a television channel devoted to it? But, such a channel could have simply televised shots of groups and singers doing their songs, as if in concert. MTV does do some of that; but the core of MTV programming is the music video, which people like Kaplan and others already writing the history of MTV describe as if it came from nowhere, as something totally new. If that were the case, then it would seem to contradict Dr. Wertham's clinical observations. Well, it isn't the case. There are mass media precedents for the combining of music with visual imagery to produce the kind of non-reasoning emotional appeal we have previously described. We have already talked about one such precedent: television advertising. For more than 40 years now, people have been watching ads which, through the clever use of music and image, have attempted to manipulate subconscious drives and instincts to sell products. Most run less than a minute, but contain numerous images and quite often a catchy jingle. Starting a little less than 20 years ago, rock music became a staple of television ads. At first it was only a few products aimed at a younger target market. By the end of the last decade, rock-laden advertisements were the dominant mode of television advertising. This preconditioning of the MTV audience by television ads was so effective that one of the first things that the new network had to do was to convince people it wasn't simply one big advertisement. To do this, the brainwashers and profilers of public opinion helped push MTV into the ``advant guard,'' to provide bizarre images that were beyond the ken of ``normal'' television. This meant pushing ``new music'' or socially outlandish music, such as heavy metal, and performers who outraged, such as Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson. The image of Madonna, clutching her breasts and crotch, wearing leather bras and panties as outergarments, helped define the image of MTV well apart from the television mainstream, and its tame, by comparison, advertisements. But it is important to remember that Madonna, herself, was and is not what is being marketed or sold through her MTV and other promotion. ``I am selling a point of view,'' she once told an interviewer. And what is her point of view? In another interview about a previous video, ``Express Yourself,'' in which she appeared chained to a bed, writhing luridly for the camera, she stated, ``I have chained myself. There wasn't a man that put that chain on me.... I was chained to my desires. I do everything by my own volition. I'm in charge, O.K.?'' The video promoting this self-crippling emotionalism won an award from MTV, that institutional authority of the popular culture.