I've been blogging more since making the mundane connection between new stuff and new readers. Also my stats have gone up after adding pictures. Nothing surprising there either. So, lately, after I finish the day's blog, I surf a while, looking for a pix that tickles my fancy and, finding one, copy it into a draft for the next day. Like the image above.
So last night, I kept wondering about the question in that day's blog: Why do people believe crap ideas? Believe me, I'm still there today. Take the financial crash...please (cue laugh track). From the beginning, I thought that basing wealth on brokered loans to people who couldn't pay them back, was shaky ground to begin with. But I told myself that I wasn't a financial whiz-kid, so what did I know anyhow? Then I remembered that I do know wild honey from sheepshit, and decided to view all proceedings from my normal if jaundiced perspective.
While the housing bubble was on full boil, and rapacious real estate brokers combed my normally sleepy neighborhood like a wolf pack, I read that this innovative financing was the new paradigm. And lo, here we are. With banks cratering, and the government playing whack-a-mole trying to grab up one after the other.
I'm old enough that the hairs on my neck prickle when I hear talk of a new reality, as opposed, I guess, to the real reality. Such chatter was popular during the tech bubble too, which I was in the middle of for some years...during the high times and during the ::pop:: Then the Current Occupant appeared, and Karl Rove declared sneeringly that the new kids created their own realities, while liberal dummies were still flubbing around in that shop-worn real reality.
Maybe you remember that reality: it was the one where actions led to predictable consequences. It's the reality we decided to ignore.
During such times, times like now, when History with a capitol H is on the move, snatching up anything in its path, I've found it's best to lay low, eat cheese crackers, and watch a lot of TV. That's how I happened on Mad Men and, despite what its blinkered young producer says, the show is a syrupy backward glance to an age when Everything Was Better.
During that time period, I worked in an ad agency too, doing paste-ups of those supermarket newspaper inserts, the ones reading Delmonte Peaches for $.10! The agency I worked for had good accounts and a full crew of Madison Avenue types and I thought the whole situation sucked. Like all the women in the firm, I too wore undergarments with lots of elastic, nylons, stiletto heels, and form-fitting dresses (see picture above), lots of make-up, and looked the way girls were supposed to look, I should have worn stained bluejeans to work. Being in that agency was like being on a road crew, but without the fresh air. All the women's jobs were low, mean, and underpaid. Guys ruled, although I don't think their reality was too hot either.
It was a constricted, rigid, authoritarian time which, as such times do, led ultimately to madness, and a cultural melt-down. It's a time that could teach us something now, if we didn't have this habit of glomming onto history, making it into a TV series and discarding it, when the ratings drop. Never mind any so-called edgy shows, all TV reinforces sappy ideas that are sloshing around in our national psyche anyway. Patriotism is good, brave men always triumph, beautiful women always win except when they screw married guys, animals can understand us, kids are cute, etc. etc. etc.
TV is a lot like cheap cologne. You can sniff it, but you shouldn't drink it.
(fade to black, credit roll)
So last night, I kept wondering about the question in that day's blog: Why do people believe crap ideas? Believe me, I'm still there today. Take the financial crash...please (cue laugh track). From the beginning, I thought that basing wealth on brokered loans to people who couldn't pay them back, was shaky ground to begin with. But I told myself that I wasn't a financial whiz-kid, so what did I know anyhow? Then I remembered that I do know wild honey from sheepshit, and decided to view all proceedings from my normal if jaundiced perspective.
While the housing bubble was on full boil, and rapacious real estate brokers combed my normally sleepy neighborhood like a wolf pack, I read that this innovative financing was the new paradigm. And lo, here we are. With banks cratering, and the government playing whack-a-mole trying to grab up one after the other.
I'm old enough that the hairs on my neck prickle when I hear talk of a new reality, as opposed, I guess, to the real reality. Such chatter was popular during the tech bubble too, which I was in the middle of for some years...during the high times and during the ::pop:: Then the Current Occupant appeared, and Karl Rove declared sneeringly that the new kids created their own realities, while liberal dummies were still flubbing around in that shop-worn real reality.
Maybe you remember that reality: it was the one where actions led to predictable consequences. It's the reality we decided to ignore.
During such times, times like now, when History with a capitol H is on the move, snatching up anything in its path, I've found it's best to lay low, eat cheese crackers, and watch a lot of TV. That's how I happened on Mad Men and, despite what its blinkered young producer says, the show is a syrupy backward glance to an age when Everything Was Better.
During that time period, I worked in an ad agency too, doing paste-ups of those supermarket newspaper inserts, the ones reading Delmonte Peaches for $.10! The agency I worked for had good accounts and a full crew of Madison Avenue types and I thought the whole situation sucked. Like all the women in the firm, I too wore undergarments with lots of elastic, nylons, stiletto heels, and form-fitting dresses (see picture above), lots of make-up, and looked the way girls were supposed to look, I should have worn stained bluejeans to work. Being in that agency was like being on a road crew, but without the fresh air. All the women's jobs were low, mean, and underpaid. Guys ruled, although I don't think their reality was too hot either.
It was a constricted, rigid, authoritarian time which, as such times do, led ultimately to madness, and a cultural melt-down. It's a time that could teach us something now, if we didn't have this habit of glomming onto history, making it into a TV series and discarding it, when the ratings drop. Never mind any so-called edgy shows, all TV reinforces sappy ideas that are sloshing around in our national psyche anyway. Patriotism is good, brave men always triumph, beautiful women always win except when they screw married guys, animals can understand us, kids are cute, etc. etc. etc.
TV is a lot like cheap cologne. You can sniff it, but you shouldn't drink it.
(fade to black, credit roll)
1 comment:
"That's how I happened on Mad Men and, despite what its blinkered young producer says, the show is a syrupy backward glance to an age when Everything Was Better."
I suppose that you're entitled to your opinions. But if you honestly see "MAD MEN" as a syrupy look back at the 1960s, I have to wonder about you.
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