Rekiwi's Blog

I've been old for a long time.

As an adolescent, I identified more with my parents' generation and their friends than with my shallow, consumerist peers.

My dad joined the Navy at 17 and experienced the world. My mom grew up on a farm in New Zealand. One family friend served as crew in B-58s. Another flew C-46s over the Hump as a member of the OSS. I met General Curtis LeMay.

I don't say this to brag. I just mean to convey my deep respect for those who have gone before.

It's with this perspective that I regard with intense disgust a recent TV ad for the new Verizon Hub internet appliance phone gadget.

For the uninitiated, you see a youngish, hippish, mildly MILFish mom in a trim, modern, homey kitchen bustling about empowering her life with a countertop search for paella recipes on her sleek Verizon Hub's touchscreen. She broadcasts the evening menu to the family with the device, reinforcing its Super-Mom-enabling hubbiness.

In seconds, she receives a video response from a pale, narrow punk of a kid, droning with snot-nosed toddler tones: "I don't know what pah-ella is, but I'm not eating it. Ever."

Super Mom sighs knowingly, gives her head a loving and resigned tilt, and then caresses her Hub to order a pizza for her ignorant, ungrateful spawn.

Excuse me?

I missed the part where the enabled, empowered, engadgetted parents are in thrall to spotty faced kids who spend most of the day fantasizing about places to stick their hard-ons.

Oh, the little boy doesn't want to eat what his mom makes for dinner? Momma will make it all right and buy a pizza for Baby.

Bullshit.

Don't like what's for dinner? Then you damned well go hungry, you little turd. I'm sure it's not the end of the world to go without the evening meal for one night. You could always buy your own dinner with your own money. But you were saving for that new iPod? Wow. Life's tough, ain't it? How about trying something different, expanding your horizons a little bit beyond your upper-middle-class corporate consumer straitjacket? Speaking of consumers, I'm sure that you didn't pay for that little camera cellphone technological miracle that you used to crap all over your mom. Asshole.

Damn Verizon to hell for trying to sell anything with this shtick.