Dr. Drew of televised fame is the latest exemplar in my purview and I thought a few words addressing a show I saw should be had.
The episode in question concerned child-spanking. The grizzly-bearded Pastor Pearl appeared as the advocate for child-spanking. Thus polarized between Drew's anti-spanking agenda and Pearl's pro-spanking ones, the debate ensued. Pearl retained his composure against the goading Drew, who kept repeating how much it hurt when Pearl demonstrated his wares by tapping Drew across the back of the hand with a tube of some sort. Not only did Pearl retain his composure, but he sure-footedly invoked studies to support his contention that children respond favourably to spanking; that a child who disobeys a parents and thus endangers himself must have if necessary as a final barrier to self-destruction a punitive measure physically doled. Noting Sweden as an example of radical increases in childhood malignant behaviour after the introduction of a no-tolerance spanking law, and adding that of course the law itself is not wholly responsible but part of a series of interrelated cultural factors, he spoke of the multitudes of spanked children who grow to be loving, successful, happy people (he seemed to emphasis entrepreneurism to cite this, which was interesting).
Drew was outraged. Like an idiot savant, he kept repeating this especially telling mantra: "It sounds like you want to raise a warrior class." Drew's contention was that spanking inspired aggression in children, spoke to their "reptilian" brain (he brought out a couple of psychologists who offered a ludicrously simplified support for this); that a child will be--get this--brain damaged if spanked (we're not talking massive beating against the skull; this is taps on the butt and hands). The psychologists ignored Pearl's continued citing of people and of studies where rather than become anti-socially aggressive in adulthood, men and women who had been spanked, including Pearl's own children, were socially well-adjusted. One of the psychologists misspoke and no doubt harmed his career on the show by saying that Pearl didn't know what he was talking about because he had "no eduction." Drew's house psychologist, meant to support Drew's advocacy of non-spanking, ended up like Drew himself to appear far more aggressive, angry, outraged and much closer to physical violence than the peaceable and logical Pearl. The irony abounds but fits.
Drew is part of the media machine and its corportist interests, of which ideology a vital feature is the subjugation of the populace, creating a pliant and docile populace, in order to control them at State-Corporate levels. Drew baulks at the idea of parents physically disciplining their children, a routine that would preempt the child from becoming an undisciplined adult. An undisciplined adult does in fact get disciplined, finally by the legal system which will physically violate the adult through the penal system and its fashioned violence, itself ensured by the coercive threat of violence by the state (e.g, police, army). To this, Drew has no complaints; this does not solicit any outrage from him; and precisely because his agenda, conscious or not, in denying a parent the right to prepare and guide his/her child is to allow the state to do it--the Corporate State is to control people, "nurture" them, plow the metaphorical fields for them in their old age, not their biological parents. By ommission, hypocrisy and prosyletization, Drew petitions mightily and to millions who imagine him enlightened, mantled by his brutalizing authority as a doctor for the absolute, inescapable exploitation of children (humanity), on a scale Ceausescu dreamt of in his headiest moments of grandiosity.
Drew and his tiny but through television and state (educational) sanctified, powerful clique, claims that a child who is spanked will hate his parent; he believes (?) this a psychological inevitability. The absurdity of the belief that a spanked child will hate her/his parent is axiomatically and in observable truth denied: the parent is the guide, the life-giver and maintainer, the teacher, the beloved. A child even in the face of the most egregious abuses of parenting will suffer acute pyschological torment rather than actively despise the parent; and in situations of corrective spanking, of hindering the child from hurting itself, the child will be able to grow and adjust favourable in its social climate and thereby appreciate all the parent did (for spanking is, after all, a small portion of the parenting). In like manner, a child unmoored from his/her parent; a child who life-giver, corrector, sustainer, becomes the corporate state, will love that state, which is far more repressive. The child in loving the corporate state will give its allegiance to it, will freely and with love offer his/her labour-energy to it as a farmer's child will labour for his/her parents when they're age precludes them from sustaining the farm.
Drew claims that spanking would create a warrior class and in one way he's right; for as Pearl notes, politicians from top (presidents/prime ministers) to the bottom rank very highly in the incidence of spanking when children; that is, many were. They indeed became warriors, not "street criminals" but grand ones. What frightens Drew, on his own behalf and those to whom he prostitutes himself, is that the spanking will occur within a context of parental love, understanding and involvement; for how could a small group own so much of so many if all thought and acted alike?
Drew indeed believes in spanking; however, he's a globalizer and wants that spanking and its consequentially-won allegiance given to relatively small number of people who own most of the world's wealth, creates its laws to sustain that wealth, and with self-generating greed wants more. Like the former Romanian leader, he would take a child and place it directly in the hands of a centralized authorit(arian)y immediately after birth. He would have it raised by that authority's apparatus of control: the television, video games, psychologists, malls (food, clothing, drugs, entertainment), and public education (which mandate has increasingly become caring for students beyond teaching; they are to parent them). Children who defy their parents blatantly, routinely, are said by these same venues--movies, television, psychologists, psychiatrists--to be undergoing a "natural" phase in their development; that is, we are told that a biological and universal principle of human life is responsible for their defiance; that it is to be understood and even embraced while ameliorating its most painful side-effects and affects by--guess who and what-- a doctor who will dispense pills and render counterproductive advice (if happiness is the sought product). The cycle ensures a front-to-end containment and control of human energy whose continuity, made possible by organs like the media, the education system, the legal system and the medical system, almost precludes the ability of an average man or woman to circumvent it and raise children outside of the tentacled vortex of global human exploitation before imagined and now seen.
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