Tiresome advertising will abound...

Virtuous Americans 1930's Style

On January 23, in Slate magazine, Jack Shafer wrote a great article called "Selling Virtue". Check it out at http://www.slate.com/id/2209615/pagenum/all. Reading it, I thought, Aha! It's not just me. Lately, in my nightly TV watching, I'd begun to pick up a preachy tone in commercials of all stripes: green energy, cars, insurance, detergents etc. I noticed that cosmetic companies were touting their "natural" make-up lines and pizzas were all about whole grain. Underneath the brave smiles of TV people, I sensed a certain anxiety: Here we are, about to have another Great Depression, and who's gonna art direct it?

Cotton wash dresses will be needed by the metric ton. For the guys, hats will be required: Brad Pitt newsboy jobs, stained trucker caps, and of course, the classic gray felt fedora. We'll ride bikes with big balloon tires. Cars will be streamlined and dark, but battered pick-ups will be ubiquitous, and all of them will run off old Chinese restaurant cooking oil.

You get the drift.

We have to be good now. Obama said so and Oprah's been yammering about it for years. We're going to give up childish things, like gaming, fast food, and snorting Ritalin, and start gathering around a battered Monopoly board instead. We'll have dinner as a family and gnaw on vegetables from our garden patch.

Personally, I find this late-in-the-game high-mindedness pretty irritating, especially when it comes from greed-head behemoth companies. I remain deeply offended when a large guy with a deep voice tells me I need to check out library books and carry bag lunches, especially since his ultimate aim is selling auto insurance. We're back to the basics, he rumbles, standing in what purports to be a public library. And the basics are good.

He should check out the libraries in my neck of the woods. Homeless people snore in chairs, and there's someone who shits on the copy machine. Don't even think about looking at the art books. Half the pictures have been razored out. Thanks to years of lousy funding, some of the basics are not good. In fact, some basics are barely tolerable.

I shouldn't be surprised that ad agencies feel we need direction and encouragement, especially of the hectoring variety. Ad agencies all believe that campaigns really do something, and I guess, with companies going ::pop:: every half hour or so, they're imagining the end of skin care, tampons, fast food, Viagra, and chat lines. And what will they do then? No wonder they're glomming onto responsibility, respect, and community to sell coffee and oil, then boring us stiff with baritone spokespeople, shots of church steeples, happy families wolfing down sandwiches, and old folks planting tomatoes. Cue music and logo. Show website address. End.

Yesterday I saw a couple of Mormon missionaries wheeling around the neighborhood. I thought it was a good time for them to be out and about, banging on doors. Goodness is all the rage.

In fact, it's a seller's market.

A religious kind of day....

KINSHASA, Congo — Accusations that a soccer player was using witchcraft during a match in eastern Congo sparked a riot that killed 13 people, a U.N.-funded radio station reported Monday. Reported by The Huffington Post 9-15-08

Today I had to skip out of the office and do some finicky shopping with a scratched through and heavily annotated list. The kind of list that includes things like: AAA batteries (optional) AA batteries (need!), get-well and b'day cards, b'day gift, T-shirt, catfood (gravy-style), Mexican Coke, Mac and Cheese (if Cheesiest, otherwise no). You get the idea. I probably need to add that the Mexican Coke on my list is not, um, Mexican coke. It's Co'Cola from Mexico, and it's made with sugar, not corn syrup, so it tastes better. It comes in a tall thin green Cokesque bottle, and has a real bottlecap. If you see it, try it out. If you can't get the Mexican stuff, kosher Coke is also made with sugar, but only appears in my supermarket during Jewish holidays. And here we are, into religion already...

When I emerged from Marshalls, sweating heavily, a tall young black guy approached me clutching a fistfull of flyers, talking as he came. M'am. I want to tell you about the story of Cain and Abel, which is a story about brothers. 'Course today we still got brothers against brothers, young brothers killin each other in the streets now, fightin with each other, gettin they heads smashed in, goin to jail, gettin out and smokin that rock. But now lemme tell you the good news is that these same brothers got a place to go and get off the rock if they accept Jesus Christ. I want to testify to you today that the rock once reached out an grabbed me, but today I have been clean, sober, single, and celibate for nine years. Course none a this is free cause we live in the world we do, so a donation of five dollers...

That was all I needed to hear, since it indicated a break from his monolog, which I wasn't following very well anyhow. I hauled out a five and gave it to him. Thank you, mam, an you have a blessed day, an' for your donation we givin you a key holder we make oursels that got the initials for What Would Jesus Do right on it.

At which point I dropped my car keys, and my Hawaiian surfer key holder fell apart on the pavement. "Look like God want you to have a new key holder," Harold noted, for that was his name. "Looks like," I agreed. We chatted amiably for a few minutes, mostly about addiction. "I figure it's a mind thing, addiction is," Harold said. "I bet you're right," I said.

Once home, I'd just started hammering on my blog, when the doorbell rang and my husband answered it. I could hear him responding to someone, and figured it was a freelance yard guy. My husband came back to my office and said, "It was two Mormon guys, who really wanted to come in. I told them my interest in Mormonism is about this much," here my husband indicated an inch with his thumb and forefinger. "They said that was okay, we could just talk about Jesus. They asked me if I liked Jesus and I said You bet, but I didn't want to talk about Him."

What would Jesus do? Ans. Beats me.

All this fit nicely into my internal musings today. I'd spotted the witch doctor pix and news story last night, and was thinking about the freak-out at the soccer game in Kinshasa. I'm no stranger to witchcraft. Coming from a Southern family, as I do, mojo of all types ran its snakey course through our lives. My grandmother, an educated common-sense type, consulted psychics and stayed in bed on Friday the 13th. My mother could witch warts off people. I watched her do it and observed that
sometimes she told the wart-afflicted to run a raw potato over the wart and bury it at midnight, sometimes she told them to put a compress of cucumber peelings on it, sometimes she would wrap the wart in a specially blessed Kleenex. I finally asked her which method worked the best. "They all do, honey," she said. "See it doesn't matter what people believe in. It just matters that they believe in something."

To which I sort of agree. Belief is powerful. It can erase warts and addiction, no doubt about it. Belief can also make people vote for a fruitcake, a fruitcake nominated to be Vice President of the United States.

So I take people's beliefs very seriously indeed. Especially people who believe in bad things.