Everyday we sit in our homes desiring goods and services that we do not need or may not even want, and discussing issues that have little or no importance to our lives other than to make small talk. Everyday we work hard to buy stuff that is better or at least equal to what society considers normal. As our former president Herbert Hoover even stated prior to the Great Depression, what he would have liked to see in every American household is "Two cars in every garage" (The American President: Herbert Hoover, 2002). We are fashioning ourselves to be boringly equal cogs in one giant corporate machine, and in turn, are losing our culture to business and propaganda. When a new "hipper" culture appears, commercialists explode the culture across the United States like a plague. What average adult would not know what a skateboard is, what reggae music is, or what Middle East tension is. We have all been commercialized by the news,

"Micro jolts of mind pollution flood into our brains at the rate of 3,000 marketing messages per day" (Hirsh, 2001).

5.Total spending by 100 leading TV advertisers in 1993: $15 billion

3.Percentage of Americans who believe TV violence helps precipitate real life mayhem: 79

The relevance of this data to the problems of commercialism is even more astounding when compared to the number of crimes that have been committed pertaining to a deviant acts portrayed on television. Former president William J. Clinton in a speech after the Oklahoma City Bombing tied the attack to the media when he suggested the bombing may have been caused by "extremist rhetoric from talk show hosts of the radical right" (Newton, 1996, p. 1). Also in the middle 1990's former senator, Bob Dole tied the violence in street crimes to sex and violence in movies, television, and popular music. Due to his and other senators' influence, we now have warnings on explicit music, rating systems pertaining to the deviant content in television shows, and a stricter code in the rating system of movies (Newton, 1996, p. 2). However, can deviance in our commercialized media truly be linked to deviance and crime in America? In many studies, yes; before they were banned from television many cigarette companies and even motion pictures to this day depict cigarette smoking as a "cool thing to do." Even further down the spiral of deviance a U.S. government report linked violence on television to violence and aggressive behavior in all people, the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) found these same findings inconclusive and unsupportive (Newton, 1996, p. 37). Psychological studies have shown that violence demonstrated to children is later mimicked. This was profoundly shown in the "Bobo doll experiment," where a grown man committed violent acts (hitting the doll with a plastic hammer, throwing the doll, punching the doll, etc.) on a clown punching bag, and later these same acts were demonstrated by both male and female children (Morris & Maitso, 2001, p. 190 and Newton, 1996, p. 37). In a report related to children who commit acts such as murder, the children have been noted to generalize that in video games death and violence is considered as short-lived, humorous, and fun. When these violent acts are then acted out, the realization that violence can be long-lasting and death is final changes their views; it is unfortunate, however, that the acts have already occurred and that now these children will most likely never be function in society again (Winick, 1978, p. 243). Other staggering facts pertaining to children and the media include:

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4382
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page double spaced)