What Color Is Choice?

Our pop (culture!) quiz for the day:

Which control-obsessed subculture of our institutionalized lives is being critiqued in this morning's NYT op-ed passage about respecting personal choice?

[quote=Robert W. Cort]The problem for the rest of us is that a monopoly like this one, without any underlying economic rationale, distorts the marketplace and hurts consumers. It will not hold in the face of democratizing technology.[/quote]
Big Business, Big Church, Big State?
Big Media, Big Law, Big Labor?
Big Education?

It hardly matters -- Big Mouths for Big Money, all.

When choice control is the goal and the winner takes all, we always play the paying public, giving it up at the gate.

Just you wait. Keep trying to starve, shame, coerce and compel us out of our own homes and choices and inclinations according to your timetables, targets and price lists. Keep manipulating the many into settling for whatever further enriches YOU and your chosen few.

Long ago in a galaxy far away, Princess Leia had advice for sociopathic powerbrokers everywhere: "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

Btw, throwing in this movie quote is a subversive breach of test security on my part, to cue you that the correct quiz answer above is Big Hollywood. Which as I also hinted, doesn't matter, because filmmaker Cort's whole column reads like sound advice to the Big Business of education rather than moviemaking.

This stance is anti-consumerist and illogical — and as hopeless as the industry's attempt to annihilate TV (**magnets, charters, merit pay, alternative certification, home education laws and hybrid public-private programs.)

The collective experience of going to the movies (**to school) has been a powerful part of the American experience for a century, but nowadays, a trip to the theater (**being taken for a ride by public school) can feel like a rip-off.

As you bristle at how much you just paid for drinks, candy and popcorn, (**for schooling YOU DIDN'T CHOOSE, CAN'T CONTROL, DON'T LIKE, and perhaps have no children receiving anyway) you're forced to watch 20 minutes of the same commercials you see at home (**receive and regurgitate years of standardized, lowest common denominator crap unfit to be called "education" even by its purveyors.)

Theater owners (**local government) get away with this gouging because the studios (**state and federal politicians in bed with teacher unions, test and textbook companies, etc.) have ensured them an early monopoly.

Freakin' control freaks. That stuff may be tolerated in their own homes, but not in mine! Control your own obscenely fabulous private empire any way you like but leave me to my own devices in my own modest realm. It's time to trim some of the biggest branches thrusting out from private enclaves and obscuring our vision and safe transit along the public's right-of-way.

Your lack of self-control as you try to control the rest of us just makes you look mean, you know, and mean-spirited.

More to the point, hidebound, which in case you Hollywood tycoons and agency PSA makers, organized teachers, preachers, lawyers and union top dogs don't read for pleasure much, means "diseased skin that hardens and thickens with loss of elasticity."

In the context of controlling choice politically, it means traditionalist, stubbornly conservative and narrow-minded.

Yep. Powerbrokers who exploit our kids, schools, system of justice and free-flowing capital for their own greedy deals are hidebound conservative traditionalists, no matter which party's values they've traditionally barricaded themselves behind, or give showy awards to, or whose home and family choices they claim to bleed (red or blue) for.

Rob Reiner, that goes for you and your Big Hollywood Big State Big School Big Money "Why? Because we LIKE you!" preschool powerbrokering, too.

Any blogger, boss, pol or lobbyist who fears and therefore actively opposes and/or manipulates real, rightful, self-empowering private choices (including the dozens of progressive experiments changing our education cultures to organically reflect what the people really want and are willing to pay for) are thinking just like the Big Hollywood moviemakers -- like hidebound traditionalists all. Nothing progressive about that.

You guys find it a good investment to play the part of championing family values, privacy and "choice" outside your chosen profit center whether studio, sanctuary, classroom or cloakroom. Just know that your increasingly savvy audiences will expect your denouement later in the story, when the script calls for you to relinquish control of our choices in whatever realm built your bankroll.

And know too, that you won't be able to count on coloring in our choices as red OR blue, once the lights come up and your scheduled showtime is over.

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