Protecting the Kids

To say that my painting “Legend of Mickey Rat” is shot through with the same absolute, ill-grounded distinction between right and wrong that once fanned the flames of McCarthyism is just plain absurd (“Smelling a Rat in Corporate America,” June 13).

I am talking about children here. Children who have been taken advantage of by mega-corporations that want their money. Disney being the biggest culprit. The text in the picture “School Days” is from the first page of the Mickey Mouse Club, 1934. It says: “Everyone knows how strong the gang instinct is in children. The Mickey Mouse Club is unique in that it furnishes entertainment of the most beneficial principles, the latter so completely worn of any suggestion of ‘lessons’ of lecturing, that children absorb them almost unconsciously.”

This was my dark inspiration. If they could control children like that, think of what they could sell them. That leads us to today. We are caught in an entertainment marketing consumer society with no apparent end. The entertainment corporations are becoming the teachers. Parents don’t like how their children are being taught. Oddly enough, they blame the schools.

Since the Mickey Mouse Club, children have been raised on entertainment. They are taught to buy things they don’t really need. Watch the Disney cartoon shows on TV today. You will see no beneficial principles, just characters hitting or being hit, filled with commercials for sugar products and cheap toys. (Disney now owns Channel 9, ABC, sport teams and next . . . their own cities.)

I am not looking back to a better time as critic David Pagel asserts. We are what we are. I just don’t think it’s very nice to take advantage of children and steal their souls for a buck.

LLYN FOULKES

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