LISTEN UP: I HATE TV KIDS

Allow me to bury the lead.

I've done a lot of bar mitzvahs. Meaning, I'm the guy that the wealthy and well-to-do hire to entertain at the party, mostly leaving it up to me to sit among the younger crowds and draw caricatures while the parents kibitz and judge one another in the next room. I've seen this behavior of the privileged offspring in its own habitat and have interceded with parental authority many times. Many in my business take a deep breath before accepting the bar mitzvah gig. Not for any anti-Semitic reason except, simply, that which we refer to as the 'Bar Mitzvah Kids.'

Bar Mitzvah Kids are not all Jewish. They're of all faiths and nationalities who, as classmates of the honored child, come to share food, cake and company. They also share the common bond of being sired by people of privilege, power, and wealth. Theyve grown up seeing their parents judge people by their dress and their accumulated possessions. They've witnessed their surrounding adults treating employees and people theyve hired to serve with supercilious indifference or the commanding demeanor of an indifferent high potentate manipulating the destiny of its lowly subjects.

As an artist trying to make a buck, I've come up against ten-year-olds who have threatened to have me fired, twelve-year-olds who order me back from my break, nine-year-olds who have attempted to hit me on the back of the head because I've dented their self-image. In turn, I have taken young teen boys by the back of their necks when they've spoken a racist remark to a Mexican waiter; I've spoken crude and frankly to haughty junior princesses who have questioned my abilities, and Ive actually reprimanded children when theyve thrown food at each other and at me.

Where are the parents of these children of the damned? They're away. Savoring their distance: Dont bother me I know he/shes that way -- why annoy ME with it?? I'm just the parent?
[BB]
So why, now, am I starting my point here, in this paragraph? It will better explain why I finally reached my breaking point watching an inane show like LISTEN UP, the new CBS sitcom starring Jason Alexander and Daniella Monet as his fifteen-year-old daughter. While watching the show, I took that same deep breath I take when Im asked to do a bar mitzvah. Simply, Miss Monet plays a Bar Mitzvah Kid--over privileged, under supervised, with waaaaaaaay to much self-esteem to have survived my presence if directly related to me.

In episode one, she punches a docile brother, tells her father he's always wrong and bans him from her life with the pretentious authority of a middle management clerk at a Wal-Mart. And Alexanders character just takes it without ever considering how this little bitch got this way. And the laugh track orchestrates this premise with its programmed approval.

Monets character would be interesting if it weren't so pedestrian. EVERY kid on TV is a Bar Mitzvah kid. And since television has pandered to the family viewer, all we see are chubby dads married to beautiful women who apparently sire mouthy, too-hip-for the-room Bar Mitzvah Kids who really deserve that one good smack across the face... The guiltiest is The Disney Channel, programming its young viewers to treat every problem in their life with the same self-obsession as a thirty five-year-old neurotic.

My theory on the origins of The Bar Mitzvah Kid does blame television. Television is not human. Humans put things into it. There is, however, an incestuous nature of television personnel. Parents hire their children, children develop projects that reflect their own life experience and, unfortunately for the rest of America, their life experience is that of The Bar Miztvah Kid: over-privileged, self-centered; the kind of the-world-knows-nothing-I-know-everything sort of hubris that will forever prevail and nurture our American society that has now fully developed into a self-centered nation.

I certainly cannot fault one show like LISTEN UP with aiding in the demoralization of American society. But from where I sit, it sure as hell reflects a lot of what I see first-hand, and I yearn even more for a day to come when we recognize self-centered behavior as annoying rather than cute.

ESPINOZA 10/01/04

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