It’s Easy Being Green

[Daveparts]

It’s Easy Being Green
By David Glenn Cox



In the land of Tinker Bell and Captain Hook that is, in fact anywhere imagination reigns. This last week NBC, the television network owned by giant parent company GE you know the folks that bring good thermo nuclear things to life. Began a campaign to go green, so they have had environment themes in all their programming. The Today show sent anchors to the poles but wasted the opportunity by bringing them back.

They’ve even turned the NBC peacock green! You feel better now don’t you, it gonna be all right. The poles will stop melting now that the peacock is green. You learn so much by watching television, why at one time I thought oil companies were greedy blood sucking bastards. Now I know that they are seeking to clean up the environment and they want to stop burning fossil fuels more than I do. By watching TV I learned Chevron wants to build parks for children to play in and BP want to clean up the environment more than the environmentalists do.

Pharmaceutical companies just want to cure disease and the immoral profits and litigation to protect patents is just necessary minutia to make that all possible. Dow chemical wants to build a better world with genetically modified crops who needs millions of years of evolution. They have fifty years of lab research isn’t that enough? Haven’t they almost eliminated the bee sting in our lifetime?

Oh, but NBC has gone green so it’s going to be all right, on CNBC they had one of their corespondents commuting by human powered rickshaw. Who says there's no serious news on television? What message would you glean from that story? Ha, ha , ha global warming is sooo funny. On My Name is Earl, inmate Earl had to work environmental messages into the inmates scared straight program. Ha, ha, ha

But the very best, the episode that should win an Emmy award, Was 30 Rock. I’m not a big fan but I had watched it before and when I saw Al Gore was making a guest appearance I thought I’d watch. The premise of 30 Rock is a TV producer trying to remain sane at a TV network full of crazies located in Rockefeller center. This week the imaginary network launched a campaign to present its self as being Green! Behind the scenes the campaign was a blatant fraud to foster public good will and promote it’s own consumer products.

Gore was called to the network by an executive played by Alex Baldwin. Baldwin told Gore that he wanted to announce a car that ran on garbage. Then Baldwin hired David Schwimer to play and environmental costumed character called Greenzo. The problem was that Greenzo was an idiosyncratic actor who fed off the attention and started to become serious about environmental issues along with an over inflated ego. Baldwin fires Greenzo for making the network look bad. The satire was hysterical The whole episode exposed NBC for exactly what they were attempting to do which was to perpetrate a fraud. A Madison Avenue schtick like new and improved or fortified with vitamins! If NBC had been serious, how about serious news prime time programming looking at not just environmental problems but at the solutions as well? Instead we get anchors throwing snowballs and riding in rickshaws. But to the writers and cast of 30 Rock well done! I got the joke, did management?

You see its easy being green if you don’t mean it