Consumerism is the desire to acquire objects and possessions often beyond our essential needs, just for the sake of acquiring them. The general public feels shopping and consuming a necessity to life. With this in mind consumer companies use this weakness in order to manipulate and influence the public in to believing they need what that particular company is producing. This is evident in Bruce Dawes poems, Americanized and Televista. To support and contrast I will use a cartoon Tram Leunig.
Bruce Dawe expresses his negative attitude towards change through his poems. "Televista" is written in a first person story. The title can be separated into two different words, tele meaning television and vista meaning outlook. The word therefore means television out look, where the word has been exaggerated to show Dawe's criticism of consumerism. The language used is jargon "the many faces of dick emery" and everyday used words. This allows the audience to relate to Dawes perspective of consumerism and the image he is creating. The opening stanza begins with "she was Sanyo oriented . He was Rank Arean bred". This describes the backgrounds of the characters through the use of metaphorical descriptions of televisions. The meeting of the two characters is from a broken/faulty television, which leads to the female inviting her male companion home. The poem follows a pathos scenario where the two characters meet up because of a faulty television and then continue their lives watching happy shows like David Nixon and Carol Burnett. This shows their life is uneventful and controlled by consumer products.
The second stanza shows that Dawe uses the television as a symbol of the relationship's status eg: he uses Bugs and Daffy, Sylvester and Tweety Pie, which show how both have childish minds and childish ways. As time moved on shows like Carol Burnett and David Nixon-"happy shows" indicated the status and the position of the relationship.
