What MTV is teaching our children.

last updated 8 January 2015

Rwanda

Richard Balenzi

Now that satellite receivers are common in Rwanda, our youth have become “fully tuned in to MTV,” said Richard Balenzi in Kigali’s The New Times. Instead of being forced to focus on “the banal events unfolding in tiny banana republics like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, or Tanzania,” they can concern themselves with the truly important problems of the globe. Only old fuddy-duddies from my grandparents’ generation would care if, say, a civil war were brewing on our doorstep. Our worldly youth, on the other hand, can tell us “whether it is actually true” that Paris Hilton’s dog was a pound puppy. They know exactly how many bullets “have pierced through 50 Cent’s massive frame.” And they have mastered the modern idiom: Nuanced, multisyllabic words are out; grunts and curses are in. “If you are the cerebral kind, then MTV is the right place to be. You will be able to learn from Beyoncé herself what the term ‘bootylicious’ means.” This, apparently, is what life in a global village is all about.