Children (and others) need protection from charlatans
By David Jardine
Many years ago on London's Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of the city's famous West End entertainment and theater district, there used to be stalls selling "Canned London Fog". This was a wheeze intended to gull American tourists and hicks from the provinces like myself. Another kiosk touted "Horse Dung Cigarettes". Doubtless a few of each were sold. Most people would have seen these wheezes for what they were, rather juvenile humor of the sort that delights in breaking wind in a crowded theater.
In the early eighties, the northeast Malaysian city of Kota Bahru, which boasted some excellent local and Thai food outlets and a wonderful night market, had the improbably named "Kent- Turkey Fried Chicken Restaurant." This was another blatant attempt to gull the public, but the locals did not beat a path to its door in very great numbers, and, I think, it went the way of many an ill-advised business venture.
If you go into the heart of Singapore's Chinatown, you may still find a cafe touting an item called "Salmon Rush-Tea", a rather conspicuous effort to co-opt the name of the controversial writer of Midnight's Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses. The evidence is slim, but I do not think that the Singapore public were much taken by this particular promotion.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, as the great Abe Lincoln so rightly put it, but .... But, what if the targeted public is adolescent or even younger? I ask this question of Indonesia, where, it seems, there is relentless assault on the minds of the very young by the advertising industry. Now, I do not have a television, but I pass one often enough to see what I will call the "Joshua Effect" at work. Joshua, in case you do not know, is the name of a ubiquitous preteen boy who is considered to have "talent" and who struts and pouts and poses across the screen in many an ad and "talent" show. Joshua, you see, is considered "cute", as are a slew of other preteens, all of them gross little caricatures.
Joshua and his like have been co-opted for a full-frontal assault on the nation's very young, especially those from families with disposable income, the so-called middle class. The message is simple: "Never mind whether they are undiscerning. Capture them young. Din into them the message, 'Consume, consume, consume'!" Their innocence has been corralled by Mammon, most notably the fast-food chains MacDonalds and KFC.
The result is obvious. Go, for example, to Jl Melawai in Block M on a Saturday and see how successful this assault has been on the TV-viewing preteen public. Stand outside Macs -- if you can put up with the sheer horror of the decor and the industrialized service -- and watch this puerile tribe, many of them overweight, leading Mom and Dad by the hand to the counter for the debatable pleasure of a Big Mac. Who's winning? The advertising industry, stupid, and never mind the lack of discernment involved. "Get 'em young!"
What's this got to do with Canned London Fog? Simply, I think, that children should be taught, as I was, to question what is being presented to them. Some countries, Sweden notably, will go even further than simply raising the question of public consumer education. They ban outright any and all advertising aimed at children. How about it? (Who's that I hear squealing offstage? Why, none other than the very admen ...)