The Attempted Neoconning of the Jetsons

Hey my mofo pomo hang-dogs... I was drifting thru the net wondering what to Bad Bad Chat when I came across this clearly jokey piece holding up the 60s cartoon "The Jetsons" as a piece of sci-fi social commentary:

"In the Jetsons' world of the future, people are pretty much the same as they are today, except that they have more gizmos and far more leisure time. There are families, kids in school, teens in love, workers complaining about bosses, rock stars, and spouses assuming agreed-upon specializations. They love good food, so long as it is made very fast. They have pets. They shop. They are buffeted by fashion trends. They enjoy sports."

Yeah, they did everything that the people who wrote the cartoon and the people who watched the cartoon enjoyed doing.

"That's the future: it is an extension of today, just as today is an extension of everything that followed before. There is no dramatic hinge of history that causes all rules to change, as socialist or fascist or other totalitarian ideologies imagine. It is just the same old struggle playing itself out in different ways."

I'm presuming form this that the writer feels the same way about the past... After all, The Flintstones had a very similar view of life... Presumably therefore stone age humans had the same desire for gossip, fast food and pets as your average modern-day Americanian. Err....

"The whole show is a wonderful commentary on how this consuming, spending, bourgeois, capitalist society is impervious to militarization."

Woah there... The claim here is that because we don't see war, conflict, exploitation, social problems etc. on the Jetsons, that these things won't exist in our neoconned future. I don't buy that. All these things could well exist in the "perfect future". All our rulers would have to do is to ensure that we never hear about them.

"Some may criticize this cartoon for idealizing a society based on middle-class values, commerce, technology, petty human problem solving. But for anyone who loves freedom and human flourishing, the Jetsons' attachment to technology and domestic life are to be preferred to nationalist hysteria and the destruction of war."

This really got me thinking. There's a section of the right-wing who complain that the media is always full of bad news. Where is the balance, they ask. Where is the good news. But that's the problem... Not reporting bad news doesn't mean that the bad news isn't there. I find it worryingly easy to imagine a future where most of society lives happily through the simple expediant of ignoring anything bad that might be happening elsewhere...

"Perhaps the greatest triumph of this show is that it managed to make peaceful bourgeois living look as exciting in cartoons as it is in real life."

Exciting? Bollocks. The Jetsons lasted for two seasons. How many seasons has The Simpsons lasted? I rest my case.

Check out the Mises Blog for some great chat on The Jetsons article.