fear and loathing
Communist Smurfs, Be Afraid

By Aaron Rutkoff

The study of political science. Hmmm... No, I think not.

Nations crumble and emerge. Governments and regimes rise and fall in flashes of violence or by the silent shuffling of the ballot. Coalitions are formed and disbanded. Ideology is the wind on which history now sails. But I don’t really care.

I know, wrong attitude for this school. Everyone is supposed to care about everything, all the issues are important, blah blah blah. Global shifts in ideological allegiance simply have little effect on my day-to-day operation. Democratic socialists can win the election over Christian Democrats in Germany, but I’ll still have to wake up and eat at MoCon. Communism can prosper and grow or flounder and fail a scant few miles from the Floridian shore, but I’ll still have too much reading to do. My crappy two-room triple will still be too small no matter how safe it is for capitalism in Hong Kong. You see, none of these abstractions effect me in any direct or perceivable way. They certainly have no effect on the way I think or act, which makes mustering vast amounts of care for such ideological issues difficult if not impossible.

Television, now there’s something to care about. TV effects me on every basic level. The way I talk, think, eat, excrete, clean, drive, dress, and sleep are all shaped by the ramblings of that staticy prism. The products I choose to cure my headaches and wipe my ass are all on TV, not in some unstable foreign economy. The final episode of Seinfeld, not the liberalization of China’s economy, occupies my mind.

Thus, I feel quite justified in advocating more study of the ideologies of TV and less of the ideologies of the globe.

Welcome to Political Science of Television 101. Today, we will reverse one of the great wrongs of academia. The ideology of communism did not fall with the Soviet Union and had very little to do with workings of the Cold War. No, dear students, communism fell when the cartoon The Smurfs was taken out of syndication. What did Smurfs have to do with communism? The Smurfs were communist propagandists, preaching daily to American youth through the modern miracle of television.

Let us look briefly at what we really know about those Smurfy socialists:

1. The leaders of most communist nations were dictators of one sort or another. The Smurfs were no different, living contently under the just albeit stern rule of the absolutist Papa Smurf. Papa Smurf was created in the bearded image of Lenin, and is the only Smurf to wear red a cap and trousers. Red, of course, is color symbol of communism. He is a model of Stalinistic leadership, dealing strictly with any Smurf not acting in accordance with the good of the state.

2. The Smurf village is the picture of the communist ideal. All Smurfs reside in identical huts, eat meals together in communal fashion, wear the same clothes, and have very little private property. Everyone is materialistically the same; it is a perfect example of a classless society. Furthermore, each Smurf has a role he or she performs for the state and is known by his or her job designation. For example, Handy Smurf fixes things, Cooky Smurf cooks the food, etc. No one Smurf is more or less important the any other Smurf.

3. Though every Smurf has an essential societal role, some are viewed more negatively in the context of the show then others. For example, Greedy Smurf is often ridiculed for eating too much or being too selfish and Vanity Smurf is portrayed as bad for caring only about himself. These two Smurfs, representing both materialism and individualism, cause problems and are often chastised by Smurf society. More proletarian Smurfs, like Hefty and Handy, are always the heroes, never the problems.

4. Brainy Smurf, the intellectual in the village, is often in conflict with Smurf society. He questions the way of Smurf life and is often unhappy. In some episodes, Brainy is sent out of the village to live elsewhere. Brainy represents Trotsky, who was a high ranking official under Lenin but was exiled because of ideological conflicts with Stalin.

5. The natural enemy of the Smurfs is Gargamel and his bumbling cat Azrael. Few people recall this fact, but Gargamel’s sole mission in each episode was to catch the Smurfs and transform them into gold coins. Hence, Gargamel clearly represents the evil of capitalism, a true threat to communist peace and harmony, in the Smurf paradigm.

So what now? Sound the alarms, reconvene the Committee on Un-American Activities, get Senator McCarthy on the phone? Abolish all traces of Smurfiness, burn those childhood t-shirts, and take those evil reruns off the Cartoon Network? Start a crusade in the name of baseball, apple pie, truth and the American Way? Hardly.

I am not trying to register an ideological opinion here. As I stated earlier, I am almost completely apathetic to the workings of politics and ideologies. The growth or decay of communism does not register any effect on me. And I certainly do not think The Smurfs were linked to some global communist conspiracy to proselytize American children of the 80’s.

But there is a bigger picture here. Cartoons, soap operas, talk shows, and even the nightly news are not as they seem to be. There is an underlying propaganda to every television program, be it Sesame Street or ER, that American society blindly overlooks.

To put it plainly, we should never trust anything the silly box says. The TV is not our culture. It should not be considered part of who we, as a people, are. Its programs are not modern folk-tale or mythology, nor is TV akin to literature, theatre, or even film.

Television is a commercial engine created to distract and sell. And sell it does. TV will sell us anything, be it an ideology or a dog biscuit. It is the driving force of our consumer society. TV will tell us anything we want—that Superman always wins or that the Cosby family always makes it—so long as we keep watching and buying. Moreover, TV is an ideology: it preaches material demand in the church of our minds. Its sole function is to cultivate our attention, expose us to products, and make us want things: "Gets whites whiter," "Keeps your breath fresher," "Cleans spills quicker."

Well, on second thought, perhaps TV is our culture and national identity today. And that smurfing sucks.