Brings me back

This story of mayhem at a Best Buy on Black Friday made me laugh, and also brought me back to my days growing up in San Francisco and at UC Berkeley. I wonder if my wife could pull that off? -- she's got the languages, and the feistiness, and she's nutty enough to stand in line for hours for a great deal, and wouldn't like line-cutters either. :-) Would be fun to see...

I could do so much better :-)

OK, I really don’t understand why ads are generally so bad.

I mean, I honestly don’t think it would be possible to create a worse ad than the SAP for midsize business ads… the ones that show various boring-looking company managers in black and white, making inane remarks about how surprising it is that SAP is affordable.

First – why the almost-black-and-white daguerrotype coloring? There must be some explanation, but whatever it is, it’s wrong. The real result is that the ads are even more boring and easier to ignore than they would be otherwise.

Next – how bad can these writers be? Is there some proof that annoying your audience, and giving them a bad impression of your product and anyone who would buy it works? Because that would be the only justification for the horrible acting and the off-puttingly stupid comments featured in these spots.

Like the guy who says “Does this mean I’m not the maverick non-conformist I think I am?” OK, I get it, it’s not intended for me, it’s intended for nerdy middle managers of boring midsize companies who know inside that they’re dweebs and just want some respect, who actually might talk themselves into believing that they’re doing this job in a midsize company because they are maverick non-conformists, rather than facing what they know: that they couldn’t cut it in a big company. (You can tell that’s the idea because these dweebs dress in cheap imitations of big-company-successful-manager clothes, not cool-smart-guy-at-a-maverick-little-company clothes).

I get all that – nice market segmentation, you moron ad people. But don’t you see that the ad basically says: “Everyone knows SAP software is horribly expensive, complicated, and not suitable for mid-sized businesses. But I guess SAP is adjusting it’s pricing so that although it would obviously still cost way more than any reasonable alternative, and not be a good deal, it still might be within the realm of possibility. So maybe I could talk my boss into thinking it was a good idea, and get to work on some huge monster project, like my successful brethren. Of course, it still wouldn’t do half as good a job for me as Salesforce.com would.” Don’t you SEE that that’s what any nerdy IT manager in your target group would come away hearing? And don’t you SEE that he would also come away shaking his head, saying “God, I am NOT so clueless and nerdy as THAT guy!”

Please, start realizing that the point of advertising is to create a POSITIVE association with your product! Like the CDW ads that show the funny, still-nerdy midsize company IT tech guy who does the Spock mind-meld thing to learn what the whitebread managers at his company want. THAT’S the right way to go – give your audience the idea that they’ll be heroic and amazing to their stupid counterparts, but won’t have to do much work, and can still be nerdy. That’s what talented, creative people do with insight into their target audience.

What country do you want to live in?

I’ve become convinced that we need a revolution in this country. Not necessarily a violent overthrow, but a change of Constitution, a re-framing of our social compact, and very possibly a break-up of the country into new self-determined, self-governing cantons.

Nothing less can fix the problems, or meet the need. Not because the current Constitution is bad – it’s wonderful – but because the government which is intended to manifest it has ceased to function properly, so our society has become diseased and destructive. Partly because we no longer follow our Constitution – it’s been warped and interpreted beyond recognition, with layer upon layer of complex nonsense now standing between the original framework and the way things really work. And partly because brilliant though it was, it no longer suffices to deal with our modern world, with its new and vastly different threats and realities. A fresh start; a new morning; a vigorous, current, engaged, and intelligent new model of our community and our citizenship is the only way forward.

This is a big topic, so I’m going to address it in a series of posts, not all in one blast. And over the course of these posts I may tweak my views, I may drill deep into a minor topic and then widen out into very general observations, and I will certainly tie together disparate ideas into a philosophical skein with which almost no one will agree fully. I would be very interested in commentary and argument from any readers – my experience is that dialogue is always a better way to explore an idea than monologue.

To start, I will outline a few initial observations on what is wrong, and what will lead to our collective crossing of the Rubicon of revolution. Popular sentiment still holds that things are not yet bad enough to need fundamental change – the general view is that our government, while terrible, is the lesser of the available evils, so that change would be more dangerous than stability. I sympathize with that view – who could do otherwise? change is always scary – but I disagree with it. I see clear signs that threats to our personal well-being are genuinely imminent; that things will get much worse very quickly, and that change is necessary – and realistic – very soon.

A few examples of dysfunction, not in any special order:

Taxation without representation. We are taxed to death, yet we have no real say in how our money is spent. We have an enormous Rube Goldberg system for the allocation and administration of our money which is out of control, and corrupt to the core. Our supposed legislators (really, our minor nobility) have created a spoils system that marries moneyed interests with political parties, in a system whose only function is to trade power for money, and they have gerrymandered districts and created a party-based, media-manipulated election process to ensure continued power. The upshot is that well over half of our rightful money is siphoned off into this massively corrupt, massively wasteful mess, over which we have no practical control.

The legal system. Our entire judicial process has completely broken down. It is no longer a system of justice, based on principles of fairness, accountability, and equality. It is instead a system of traps and tricks; an arbitrary and powerful contraption into which one ventures at one’s peril. It is manipulated boldfacedly by those with the power and money to wield it as a weapon or a shield, while it imposes capricious and idiotic penalties and strictures on the rest of us. From the simplest interactions between citizen and cop, on down to the horrific snakepit of bureaucratic regulations and civil litigation, and the slimy, cynical meatgrinder of our criminal due process and punishment processes, it is nothing more than a threat to our personal well-being. The law no longer protects us nearly as well as we could do ourselves. A few actual examples to make this clear:

1) Andrea Yates, and indeed, the whole concept of “innocent by reason of insanity”. Is it not immediately obvious to the stupidest among us that anyone who would kill five children is insane in any reasonable sense? Insanity does not “explain away” or “excuse” murder, nor is it one of several possible causes of murderous behavior. It is impossible to commit murder without being insane. The current system essentially says that if we’ve gotten around to LABELLING your particular cluster of indicators as “insane”, then you get treated as if you have an illness, while otherwise you get punished.

How completely idiotic and dysfunctional! Of course the poor black kid raised on gang streets is every bit as insane (or not) as stupid white-trash religious-nonsense-spewing bitch Andrea Yates, but their lawyers may not play the same intellectually and morally bankrupt, politically correct bullshit game, so their clients get to be gang-raped and beaten in prison instead of coddled in a comfy mental ward, treated and evaluated by half-witted pseudo-doctors who have worked their way through a few years of institutional ass-kissing, lobotomization, and pussification to get to the point where they have the power to claim authority over supposedly medical issues, and released with a wink and best wishes.

2) Child rape sentences. Is it any wonder that cable news propagandists and other populist rabble rousers make hay with slap-on-the-wrist sentences of probation for child rapists, by judges who harbor secret fears that there but for the grace of God go they, so they treat the rapists as pitiable victims of a syndrome, rather than holding them accountable for their actions? The whole concept of trying to plumb the inner depths of someone’s soul to determine their proper punishment is misguided. The very idea that one can explain a criminal act as an inevitable consequence of environmental forces, saying “he had no choice; his action was pre-ordained and forced because of the combination of his prior circumstances, which we may pseudo-scientifically label as a syndrome”, and then conclude that accountability is inappropriate, is so post-modernedly sadly stupid and misguided that I struggle to deal with the mental weakness that fosters it.

Can modern social theorists and administrators not understand that the basic idea of justice is that one is accountable for one’s actions – period? That a syndrome does not excuse bad behavior; that the perpetrator is every bit as bad and as accountable no matter what combination of molecular pathways may have resulted in his nature being the way it is? That the color red is no less red when one understands what physics causes it to be red? No – because they’ve been blinded and confused by the irrelevant minutia of their arcane craft; they believe that their bullshit is sophistication; they perceive their lack of clarity as depth of understanding. That is the nature of decadence, and we are indeed decadent and ripe for revolution.

3) Eminent domain. This is a relatively minor offense in the scheme of things, but is nonetheless a clear indicator that government is not operating for the welfare of its citizens, but instead for corporate interest. A legal framework that was intended to insure that individuals could not endanger the public good by refusing to allow the community to use their property for critically necessary social infrastructure has been warped into a legal means for power-crazed and stupid political bodies to steal personal property for the flimsiest of reasons.

Government entitlement programs. Oh my word, could anything be stupider than the maze of insane regulations, unaccountable administrative bureaucracies, and wasteful, demeaning doles which characterize modern government?

1) Affirmative action – what could be more unfair, or more destructive of the intended beneficiary? It punishes competence and rewards incompetence; it creates racial divides and enforces and institutionalizes racial discrimination in the name of ending both; it perpetuates poor performance; it undermines accountability and excellence.

2) Prescription drug benefits – otherwise known as Guaranteed Huge Profits For Big Pharma. What kind of insanity is it that guarantees that the entire medical care delivery infrastructure in this country will be bound to push treatments that are carefully calibrated to maximize drug company profits; that mitigate but do not cure conditions; that create long-term chronic dependence; that divert resources from solving real problems to the creation of products that will drain this bureaucratic spigot? Are people so stupid as not to see past the shell-game that takes taxes from over here and pays the money to drug companies over there, in the name of socially paid services, as if the money and the drugs just dropped free from the sky? Or the complicity of the bureaucracy in allowing drug companies to fool dumbed-down video-addled Americans with deceptive marketing that encourages their addiction to “the purple pill”, recreational sex pills, “I’m All Advil” cool-moms-pop-headache-pills-like-candy misdirection, and other baloney? Do they not see the idiocy in a government policy that guarantees that our aging, hypochondriac, incapable-of-rational-thought population can get all the useless, addictive drugs that they can be swindled into wanting to deal with their made-up syndromes (as well as the real ones that result from their unhealthy lifestyles, or from the natural consequences of aging, for which drugs are inappropriate and inefficient), and that we’ll all pay for this, at whatever monopolistic price levels Big Government and Big Pharma feel like imposing?

3) Social security – the national retirement investment scam. What in God’s name makes people think that they will be better off if the government takes one sixth of their salary and invests it for them? Does anybody ever do the math – or are people’s arithmetic skills so poor and so discouraged by our “please don’t make me think” culture that they can’t calculate that if they took that money and invested it privately in conservative vehicles – say in an insurance policy or bonds – they would do better? So now we have a scam where the government is allowed to rob me, in order to pay for whatever bullshit they want, in a Ponzi scheme which we know for certain will not be able to pay us back even the meager returns it promises – all because our government is NOT of or by or for the people, but is instead a completely corrupt, dysfunctional, and stupid enterprise that operates by and for those insiders who have the connections to use it for their own gain.

Abominable. And fortunately (and unfortunately – pain’s a comin’ soon) increasingly unstable. More next time.

Where did the zeitgeist go?

As Mr. Spock would say – fascinating. This morning, as ESPN drones away on the TV over on the right side of my big desk, I see another Nitro commercial that must have been done by a completely different team. I am guessing that BBDO has assigned a few teams to work on the Nitro account, and while I loved the work of the team that created “The Planet”, which I surmise is assigned to capture smart old bastards like me (why, I don't know, because there's not a chance in hell that I would ever buy this little Rav4-with-a-hemi), I find the 20-something-targeted ad which I saw this morning to be a juvenile betrayal.

By the way, the fabulous The Planet ad is best seen in the 60-second version, where the real artistry is obvious. In an earlier post, I mistakenly linked to the 30-second version which is OK, but missing too much. The absolutely perfect touch is when the weird little Easter-island cone-creature pops up at the end. That’s a moment that for me, hearkens back to the brilliant, profound use of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll meet again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove, a truly great moment that summarizes and ties together one of the very greatest movies ever made.

I can’t find a link to the disappointing new ad, but it shows a carload of post-college “cool people” (straight from Central Casting, as stereotypical as can be) in a Nitro, as the driver squeezes it into a narrow space next to an idiot whose car is parked at an angle. To make enough room to open the car-door, they open their windows and blast some hip-hop on their Sirius satellite radio – and look at that, the car next door starts to vibrate away. The last shot shows that this blast of sound has pushed all the nearby cars away, not just the offending angle-parker, so that the Nitro has cleared a 15-foot moat of parking-lot space all around it.

Whoop-dee-doo. This ad is disappointing on so many levels, but here are three.

1) All the Sirius product placement in the ad is very un-cool, completely ruining the mood. I’m sure that Dodge and Sirius have a lovely corporate partnership, and had to do something, and the clueless suits probably thought this was great, but this ham-handed effort is just awful.

2) The WHOLE POINT of the “The Planet” was that stupid CGI tricks are stupid – that everyone under the age of 100 is unimpressed by fake backgrounds and stupid visual effects. If I see another ad with a baby or a dog's mouth spouting a lot of cute adult comments, or with a car driving upside-down over an impossible landscape, I'm going to throw a brick through my TV screen. The Planet dealt with this jadedness by going all out; by creating a symphony of visual effects and perfectly selected music; a beautifully orchestrated fantasy sequence that was shockingly well executed. The whole point was that it took one from a bored “more of the same crap” impression all the way up to a standing-alone-in-the-living-room-applauding huzzah for its breathtaking creativity.

But this parking-lot piece just goes back to stupid visual effects… Oh, my, the loud radio in the Nitro is making the car next door bounce away – how interesting! Oh, look at that, now all the cars have been pushed away, making a ring of empty space around the Nitro – how amazing! No, it’s not interesting – it’s the same old stupifyingly dull same ol. It’s background noise. I find it really hard to understand how the folks who green-lighted this trash did not get that this piece actually undermines the breakthrough positive impression created by The Planet.

3) The Planet was wonderfully rich – a tour de force of storytelling and texture; more like a haiku of a movie than a commercial. But this parking lot thing is flat and boring. I mean, what could BE more boring than a car full of vaguely cool, almost invisible, completely typical people with flat voices and flat clothes, parking a frikking car, with most of the visual and thematic attention paid to a totally plain and uninteresting satellite radio screen? The contrast is jarring.

I can only conclude that there are two separate teams working on the Nitro account, AND that although I clearly respond terrifically to The Planet and can’t stand the Parking Lot fiasco, there must have been a bunch of focus group clones and marketing suits who thought this latest thing was just as good or better for their target audience. Which makes me wonder what’s wrong with the target audience.

I know what I know

You know, as my sisters and I can affirm with gusto, growing up with clueless parents has it’s downsides. One of them is being clueless yourself. I freely admit I’m clueless about many things.

So in the spirit of trying to help those who may be equally clueless – because we live in a screwed-up society – and because over the decades, even an idiot like me picks things up, I will share the following advice: a bit of hard-won insight after getting it wrong about a thousand times.

When your wife says something critical about you – like “sometimes I think you are an idiot!” – it is often good to respond by saying (with a big smile, and maybe a hearty laugh, and genuine affection which you are willing and able to act on then and there if afforded the opportunity): “You have got to be the cutest 45-year old woman I have ever seen!”

Now there are lots of ways for this to be bad advice. Too much emphasis on “45” can get you in trouble in lots of ways. It’s a subtle thing, in the whole balance of the sentence and the gleam in your eye that has to be right. And if you always respond this way, it’ll lose it’s appeal pretty quick, and if you don’t really mean it, why it’ll blow up in your face. But if you are ready to “hit that” :-) at a moment’s notice, it’ll be a winner.

Useful, eh? Now isn’t that better than stupid political opinions, technology bullquackery, and godawful math and philosophy and other profound baloney?

Talkin' 'bout my girl

My girl is feeling a little sick. I came home this afternoon to find her right eye all red, with black smudges on the white fur around it, and my poor baby was rubbing her face on the ground, and rubbing her eye with her paw, and generally confused.

I think my overactive little monster must have scratched it slightly, jumping up into the tree branches after a bird, or leaping through the air at top speed to go from one side of the house to another, keeping watch over every thing that dares to go past our front gate, but not paying much attention to what might be in her way. Or maybe she was scurrying around the corner and skidded through the pebbles on one side of our house, and one sprayed up into her eye.

Whatever it was, she’s handling it. She walks around the house with one eye closed, a bit slow, knowing that something is wrong and that she needs to take it easy and let it heal. Or maybe she’ll forget for a moment, when dinner is served, and she hops around on her hind legs looking at the food and then up at us, as if to say “You wouldn’t keep anything good from me, would you?”

But she’s very happy to be attended to. She’s nine years old now, our feisty, happy, healthy old girl, and she knows beyond knowing that we will take care of things, that we are all-powerful – but she has absolutely no conception that we should do any more than we do. Like the perfect devotee of the perfect religion, she knows that whatever her masters do is the right thing, the best thing imaginable and all that she asks for, and she is completely content to be subject to our omniscience and omnipotence, although there’s hardly anything we can do.

I lie down next to her on the floor, and gently rub the water away from her eyes and out of her fur. I feel around her eyes carefully, making sure there's nothing lodged there, and no injury. I put my face next to hers, I stroke her face softly, I massage her head and rub her tummy. She blinks awkwardly, opening one red eye a bit to look up lovingly, and then puts her head back down to rest and accept more love. I invite her up onto the couch and attend to her for awhile longer, letting her relax. Eventually she drifts into a deeper-than-usual sleep, assured that all is well, and letting herself heal. Every little while she wakes up, and is happy to receive more attention, and knows when to let her head sag back down and her eyes drift closed and rest some more.

There is almost nothing more tender than the relationship of loving master and loving dog. She’s lying here now, my white-furred little baby. I often feel that Lady and I can understand each other perfectly, but not in words, only in a kind of instant, elemental communication, which I am not capable of transcribing. I am not a believer in any religion or any system – in fact, the whole concept of “belief” as opposed to “knowing” or “thinking” is a very odd, human kind of craziness – but I know that in some sense, Lady will wait for me when she dies, and that we’ll be together after I die. Now isn’t that silly?

Wasn't it always this way?

What a world we live in... Political TV shows are all complete bullshit – every one is just inside baseball horse-race commentary that has zero to do with policy issues or choices, or even factual reporting or basic analysis. We’re fighting a war that’s not a war – where’s the “war” in Iraq? What would “winning” be? Who are we fighting against? Who’s on our side? What nonsense! We have governance by and for global corporate and financial interests, and for the uber-rich, with less and less of a façade all the time – because the façade is no longer necessary. We live in the world of The Marching Morons (a wonderfully prescient, ironic little story by Cyril Kornbluth) and Brave New World.

I am saddened by what has happened to this country – to our culture, our politics, our very souls – and I’ll get back to all that soon, as soon as I can stomach it. But for the moment, I want to celebrate greatness.

I’ve said for years that, unfortunately, all the smartest, most capable people in America are working on Budweiser commercials. Media, generally, is where it’s at – movies, TV, music, music videos, commercials… and the greatest art is being created in that crucible. Today, as I sat vegging in front of the telly, taking a well-deserved rest after a couple of hours of weeding, raking, and general fun in the sun, after frying up my weekend morning bacon and eggs and toast and strong coffee, watching meaningless, but wonderfully produced NFL football, I was brought up off the couch by some of the best art I’ve seen in awhile – one of the new Dodge Nitro commercials.

Wow. If only humans were going to be around in a century or two. I would love to know that at some point, with historical perspective, future humans would look back and understand how things were turned on their head; how different things were from what people believed they were. How the whole political thing was a boldfaced sham; history was not what was in history books; everything that was called high art was complete crap, and true poetry was to be found in Chevy Silverado commercials, with their gorgeous use of John Mellencamp’s “Our Country”, and the incredibly subtle and profound “The Planet” from the Nitro people (BBDO, I believe). I’m not quite sure they know what they’re doing either (but I think they do; I just think they can’t say so) – but it doesn’t matter. This stuff is every bit as good as John Keats or Charlie Chaplin…

Thank God for small miracles.