“So serene on the screen you was mesmerized,
cellular phone soundin’ a death tone,
corporations cold turned you to stone before you realized,
They load the clip in omnicolor
They pack the Nine
They fire it at prime-time…”
-Rage Against the Machine “Bullet in Yer Head”

“You are what you eat.” We all heard that growing up, a piece of conventional wisdom designed to provoke us into thinking about the food products we put into our bodies. But as much as we are what we eat, it is also true that we are what we smear into our armpits or slather in our hair or rub on our skin. We ingest all of that too. So, in that sense, we are the unpronounceable chemicals we eat and we are also the unpronounceable chemicals we use to coat our bodies and faces and hair.

But there’s another way that “we are what we eat,” that we become what we ingest, and it’s something we rarely think about. What we put into our minds. Just as much as our food determines our biology, what we see and hear and absorb into our minds impacts how we think, how we understand the world, how we perceive reality, how we shape our own identities in relation to the world we engage.

None of us exists in a vacuum. We are all bombarded on a daily basis by millions of messages, some of them we consciously consider and some of hem we do not. But just because we do not consciously consider them does not mean they do not impact us. Consider, in a world wher eyou are confronted several times an hour to buy, buy, buy you may not actually purchase any of the products presented to you, but at the same time, in a world where buying and selling are the social norm, you also will not question the morality of commerce. The constant messages urging you to buy, buy, buy have the impact of establishing a norm, a cultural standard that you do not question.

Your exposure to constant sales pitches may not persuade you to order a pizza or pick up a bag of tacos; you may not buy that luxury car or a new pair of basketball shoes, but you implicitly accept the normalcy of a world where impersonal corporations are the source of your food, your clothes, your transportation, your employment (if you’re lucky) and your housing. Every aspect of your life is brought to you by strangers who do not care about you personally and hope to exploit you for their benefit as much as they can.

We do not question if this is how it ought to be.

We participate unquestioningly in a complex system here we have virtually no power at all over the content of our food, the materials in our clothes, the manufacture of our transportation (or the social spaces of our cities that necessitate transit), the kind of work we perform, or where we live (homes constructed according to the standards of strangers who do not know our needs).

One of the dominant social norms we never question is respect for authority. We defer to those with badges and titles. We do not question why we do that, or whether it’s in our own interests to do so. We just do it. Millions of us. Hundreds of millions.

The most immediate symbol of authority is the cop. The cop is the universal representation of the law.

If we look at the network prime-time television, what do we see? Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Criminal Intent, CSI, CSI New York, CSI Miami, CSI Los Angeles, NCIS, Cold Case, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, Cops, America’s Most Wanted, Person of Interest, Flash Point, and a host of news magazine shows like Dateline’s Unsolved Mysteries. Network programming is filled with cops. There are cops everywhere, on every channel. And even in shows that are not crime dramas, many of the prominent characters are cops: Ghost Whisperer, for example, where the main character’s boyfriend is a cop; or Mike and Molly, a sitcom where the mail lead works as a cop. Why are cops on every channel, all the time? Is this accidental?

A friend of mine proposed, as devil’s advocate, that perhaps cop dramas are more interesting—which would explain why, for instance, we do not see “plumbing dramas” on every station. But this isn’t really a valid argument. In reality, most cops on most shifts do no more of interest than a plumber. In reality, the shift of a cop is no more exciting than the shift of a school teacher or an electrician. In fact, school teachers, by all available data, work a far more dangerous job than cops do.

But you don’t see “teacher dramas” on every channel, all night long, do you? No. You see cops. Every channel, every night. You see symbols of authority and law. You see regulatory systems of society operating consistently and well. You see plenty of messages that you never question, reinforcing confidence that this system works, persuading you to conform and comply.

Is it simply paranoia to see a correlation? I read somewhere recently that there are only 4,000 police officers in the city of Atlanta. That’s a city of roughly 400,000 people. Using Atlanta as the standard, we can estimate that roughly 1% of our population is in law enforcement. So why does all of network television pump cops at us every hour of prime-time viewing?

Can we see this as anything but some kind of social agenda? To what degree are we kept under control and unquestioning by the constant, reinforced messages beamed into our brains by the cop-drama networks?

Think also for a moment about the sponsors of that entertainment. The sponsors mostly attempt to sell you technology, food and pharmaceuticals (when they aren’t advertising for the network’s programs). While providing you pro-cop propaganda to keep you docile and passive, the corporations push technologies to make you dependent, food that makes you complacent and sleepy, and pharmaceuticals that turn you into a compliant zombie with no capacity for resistance nor self-determination.

Police, pizza, and pills.

Now contrast that with the reality of actual cops pounding occupy protesters in the head with billy-clubs, pepper-spraying peaceful college students in the face without provocation, or murdering unarmed Black men like it’s hunting season, and tell me whether or not the prime-time programming is serving its designed purpose.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the networks are copping us into a state of non-freedom, that their messaging is influencing us. So, if we want to be free and we recognize how the cop shows are colonizing our thinking, a necessary first step is to shut it off. We have to reject the false mythology pumped at us. We have to fill our time with constructive and liberatory projects.

First we push the cops out of our minds.
Then we push them out of our world.
Freedom is a world without cops.