Well I doubt anyone will be arsed reading this, which is a pity... but still I would like to know what people think.

Article by Michelle Handelman and Monte Cazazza.

The biggest conspiracy of all, which few even dare to acknowledge, is that we are victims of our birth. Thanks to the often accidental result of a conjoining of simpletons we are yanked unasked into this noxious land of pretense. We are doomed to fit into someone else's plan until we become cunning enough to find a way out. By the time we figure out where we stand, it's too late to leave, and even suicide has become a felony.

The second biggest conspiracy comes into play soon after birth - the weaning and shaping of new lives into the Consumerist Reality, which is what the behavioural science of marketing children's cereals is all about. Leaving the supermarket without a box of Breakfast With Barbie is not a crime. But your kids will make you think it is if you don't purchase at least a couple of holographic polychromatic "free prize inside" Nintendo Cereal Systems.

It's not just about the mood-elevating refined sugar product they are selling. (You could make a good case for food manaufacturer's collusion with the AMA, ADA and FDA, supplying a ready quantity of sugar-addicted children with juvenile diabetes and dental carries.) With children's breakfast cereal, the product is nominally different from brand to brand, and then primarily in its food colouring. No, the food product is only a Trojan horse into the hearts and minds of the little Billys and Debbies.

Food manaufacturers are training children to gorge themselves on style, on pop culture. The corporate mascots and icons of the past can no longer serve contemporary corporate lebensraum. Children are to have a TV show, a top movie, a record album, a video game, a doll or toy to accompany their eating experience. Kids are to have breakfast with the same "friend" who appears on the back of their tee-shirts and as toys in their sand-box and as characters on endlessly re-run television shows. This "freindship" is purposefully imaginary rather than tactile. The images are seductive, but are not tangible, creating angst in the young children who gorge themselves with Teenage Mutant NInja Turtle cereal in order to fill an absence inside them.

Advertisting works on two premises: 1 Convincing us to buy what we don't need. 2. Convincing us to buy back what we already have.
Advertising spreads its economic hegemony through the tried and true religious principles of fear and guilt. Advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges its victims to believe that satisfaction can only be obtained through the symbolic magic or grace of its commodity. Foodstuffs that are advertised are usually processed - meaning more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. Children's cereals rate high in all four of these iniquities.

Cereal boxes are designed to hold young ones in thrall as they progress through the normal transitory stages of orality and anality. The symbol of consumption - the open mouth - is found on nearly every box. More subliminally, more symbols of the act of excretion are found on such products as Cookie Crisps, Corn Pops, and the aptly named Cocoa Pebbles. Cookie Crisp gives us a lipsmacking bandit with a tongue sticking out of a stretching mouth. Cocoa Pebbles is even less subtle. Barney and Fred are placed on opposite sides of a large bowl containing the chocolate cocoa pebbles. The first perversion comes with the concept of Barney and Fred engaging in a menage-a-trois in oral consumption of Pebbles (the name of Fred's daughter). The clincher is in the giant cereal bowl before them with a hole bored out in the centre with the aid of Barney's "drill." From that sphincterish hole, large brown blobs are shitted out.

The cover of Corn Pops, formerly Sugar Pops. also boasts the prevalent hole with flying feces, with the O in Pops jettisoning large yellow-brown blobs to all corners of the box. The predominant colour of Cookie Crisp and Cocoa Pebbles is brown, while Corn pops accompanies its brown with urine-yellow stains.

Breakfast with Barbie appeals to the precious libido of pree-teen girls and boys. The pink motif of the box is targeted for girls, and perhaps sissy boys rebelling from their puppy dog tail stereotype. But the image of scantily-clad Barbie showing lots of plastic flesh might be just the perfect breakfast companion for the developing heterosexual boy. The result of this may be to confuse a young boy's sexual orientation. This may be welcomed by food manufacturers, for market surveys have found gay men to be more avid shoppers than their hetero counterparts. For the girls, the pink design of the Breakfast with Barbie box suggests nothing more than pre-pubescent female genitalia. To this end, an optical illusion that appears on the Breakfast with Barbie cereal box panders to the primal fears of a young girl's sexual self-discovery. In between Barbie's legs an undefinable form emerges very pink and very erect. Is it a giant clitoris? A tongue? Daddy's penis? Further investigation reveals the form as Barbie's pink sunglasses which rest upon her knee.

Exclusivity, which has played a big part in status advertising for the last 70 years, has only just recently been applied to the children's marketplace. Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all offer a "limited edition" box with a hologram on the front. This may be the most dangerous form of advertising of all, since it foments such anti-social and competitive values as wealth and status. The collision of children's games with consumerist doctrine carries the developing mind further afield from the childhood dreamstate, so necessary to the information of a whole and healthy personality.

Paramount in the invasion of economic hegemony into childhood imagination is the cynical revamping of fairy tales in the use of the "Magical Agent" to convince the children of the merits of sugar cereals. Lucky Charms' friendly Irish midget is a pied piper who keeps children in line with the promise of sweet confections, controverting parental dicta not to accept candy from strangers.

Ghost busters and its spinnoffs make good use of the unspoken secrets and mysteries that comprise the religious experience of childhood through uts ridicule of adult oppressors. The prize inside Ghostbusters glows in the dark, glows secretly to children beyond the consciousness of adulthood. Corn Pops offers a prize "Ghost Detector" inside its box. The "Ghost Detector" is a psychic geiger counter, a thin piece of heat-sensitive glow-in-the-dark plastic which curls up in one's hand indicating the presence of a "ghost." Batman cereal (the bat itself has long been associated with darker practitioners of the occult) offers a glow-in-the-dark "bat disc flyer" in exchange for a coupon. The hologram, itself a form of Techno magic, is an offer available from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ceral in the form of a Holographic tee-shirt from another dimension. And Nintendo Cereal System offers the child an oppertunity to buy the secret 'power' either on casette of in a magazine. Presumably, this empowers the child to go beyond the limits of parental authority. PMRC would do well to look at these marketing ploys as the earliest link in the breakdown of the family unit.

The masters of commerce have let children of America know they are what they eat. A kid can be Batman or even Barbie or Mr. T. or even the voracious Pac-Man. can Satan Crispies be far off? (We've heard of a plan afoot by one of the three big cereal manaufacturers to begin test marketing Jesus flakes in several predominantly Catholic South American countries and Mexico.

I actually did read all that, and found some parts to be a quite interesting.

I wonder what Jesus flakes will be like.....?

wow... what a conspiracy.... and i have coco pops in my cupboard... what will become of me,



i never was allowed cereals like that when i was a youngun... i only got weetbix and cornflakes... with milk if i was lucky....
on a special occasion i got fruit loops...

I was exactly the same, weetbix on school mornings and corn flakes on weekends... I was allowed 1 box of fruit loops every Christmas holidays, and thought it was the greatest thing ever.

heheh we must have been deprived children!

well i diddnt even have cornflakes it was weetbix or starve tho i was allowed toast ONCE a month

I never ate toast as a youngun, I talked myself into thinking I hated it up until about a month ago, when Pange forced it down my throat... now I love it!

I love sugary cereals. But I dont buy them cause they're too expensive.


That was a good article, Ange. Where did you find it, just on the net or in the paper or something?

HAHAHAHA, i had a great laugh reading that.

i was only allowed weet-bix or cornflakes also, but during the holidays, we could have coco-pops

the bit about what advertising aims to do is a really really dodgy way of looking at it, although it is correct, it focuses on the wrong thing, advertising aims to sell a product, thats it, the company wants income, so they want to sell their product, they dont really care if you dont need it or allready have one, they cater for everyone (usually a target audience though).

and the psyco-analysis of how much these adverts affect the children is rediculous, i do agree the level of advertising to children is shocking, which is why our government is taking steps to stop this (ie no fast food adverts during kids programs, and soon to be no children toy products allowed either).

either way, these "big conspiracy" thingos piss me off, interesting as they are.

Seeing this stuff pays for my meals, I suppose I should weight in ... sort of.

However it appears to me that this is actually no more than a joke article anyway, and a parody of that species of sociology essay that regularly places (in this case apocalyptically) epic theory behind the ultra-mundane. Therefore to go into detail about how it absurdly overly-rhetorical or poorly theorised it is would only make me look ridiculous for not "getting it".

yeah i wasnt sure if it was or not, but thought id point out the annoyances i had anyway

I'd like to know where it's from actually, but I'm guessing the authors are conceptual artists, or perhaps experimental writers, of some kind. I'm used to this stuff from them


..If I'm wrong I look really silly right now, of course; but I don't think anyone trying to get their article taken seriously would call it what this one is called. Nor write it in such an inflamed and unprofessional way.

The second rule of Fight Club is...

The book the article is from is called Apocalypse Culture (Feral House Publishing). It's a collection of fucked up, quirky and interesting articles.

I was looking at buying that once. Feral House have some good stuff.