Chris Dunfield
Stacey Knapp
English 1A
23 March 2013
Reading
in America-Killer Culture (reading response)
An article in Reading America called Killer
Culture, by David Kupelian, portrays 20th century American
culture, media, and society. David Kupelian holds the belief that
kids should be both home schooled and shielded from mass mainstream
culture/media. He targets American parents and Christian thinkers,
as well as corporations who create the youths' culture like,
“Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Universal Vivendi, and AOL/Time
Warner.”(Ibid) David Kupelian holds the belief that kids are
extremely susceptible to influence, and can easily have their
perceptions molded and changed, which I agree with. Thus, children
are in great need of some kind of good influence. I agree with David
in his belief that, “children deserve and desperately need
firmness, patience, fairness, limits, kindness, insight, and a good,
non-hypocritical example.” (Kupelian) One point I do not agree with
him on, however, is that I do not think all kids should be home
schooled; the main problem is with mass media outlets owning and
controlling everything that people are so frequently exposed to, the
'Killer Culture'.
Corporate culture has thus effectively starting
creating culture through their monopolization of these forms of media
that continually bombard our senses. David examines this effect of
corporate America and advertisement well when he says, “This would
be bad enough-- if corporate America were just following and
marketing the basest instincts of confused, unsupervised teenagers.
But they are not following, they are leading-- downward.”(Kupelian).
Corporations own every commercial cable channel, and are responsible
for almost all the advertisement we are exposed to; this means that
they have the power to, and do, create culture through the exertion
of this control. Clearly, something has to be done about the total
domination of most peoples senses that (these small groups of people
behind the most) powerful corporations in the world are able to
exert. I agree educating people so that they are more aware of what's
behind what they are being constantly exposed to is one of the most
important steps we can take, but homeschooling is not the way. People
need social interaction with one-another; I think homeschooling would
just further feelings of separation and angst in the community at
large. On a larger note, the power of these corporations and many
others is way to vast and must be limited, corporations have the
power to succeed international laws regarding the environment and
trade, something that quite obviously raises a red flag! Once people
become aware of what is going on, others will act out against these
unethical and unlawful act of structural violence our 'killer
culture' exerts on the global (undeveloped) South.
Word count :450
