Everyman, I Will Go With Thee.

I take a lot of shit for a lot of people for not watching anything on TV. Not the perennially inconsistent Knicks. (Their only consistency is their inconsistency.) Not the bloated Yankees. (Who average about one win for every $10 million they spend on payroll.) Not one of the 32,000 fantastic mini-series on Hulu, or Netflix, or Peacock, or Peabrain, that I'm told are better than anything that's ever been aired (aired isn't the right word anymore, but I don't know what the right word is) ever before.

I'm sure I'm missing out on all sorts of things where blood splatters all over the wall, flames ascend to the heavens, people are raped and every third word is a curse. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of great television. Everyone tells me so about 74 times a day.

But until someone can promise me whatever they're beckoning me to watch is better than Fassbinder's 14-hour "Berlin Alexanderplatz," or funnier than either Buck Henry's "Get Smart," or Jay Ward's "Rocky and Bullwinkle," I will stick to my hermetic ways and choose to read. 

This was more than enough.

Besides, from everything I hear, actually finding a show is about as complicated as running a Soviet submarine blindfolded. I already wish I had a TV with an antique dial I could turn and just a dozen channels. That was enough. I have no need to take up an activity that will lead me to throwing my size 13s through the Samsung in what's sure to be a time-sheet-filling-out level of frustration. 

Reading "Origin Uncertain" on Thursday night, which is so erudite as to be nearly impenetrable, I came upon the passage above and put the text down for a while to think about it. That's what I mean by impenetrable. The book is so full of wisdom, I could scarcely read one sentence without having to stop and think about it. Really think.

That makes sense, actually, because Liberman's book wasn't really written as a book--it was written as a blog called "Oxford Etymologist" and compiled from there. Link here.

Let's look at Liberman's first sentence, highlighted above: "it often takes greater effort to write a good 'popular' book than a scholarly one."

That simple sentence explains perhaps better than anything I've ever read why so much advertising sucks like so much advertising. The "greater effort" Liberman is writing about--an effort to learn, ask, simplify and clarify--is seldom allowed today.  So ad people (or people who purport to be ad people) write any old indecipherable crap, or worse, unintelligent crap and leave it at that.

We forgot to explain why things are important. Worse, we forgot to ask. Worse, we forgot to care. In fact, when advertisers stopped caring about people, people stopped caring about ads.

That's reciprocity. 

Think about one of a trillion terms you hear every day. Say, "anti-lock brakes," or "high def," or "dual core processors." Each of us has heard these empty phrases literally thousands of times. Yet no ad person--because it takes effort--ever explains what they are or why they're important. Instead they bombard us like Lilliputian arrows against Gulliver, or cosmic dust pelting us all incessantly.

So much crap is all around us, so loud, so persistent that 99% of us pay attention to nothing. Why should we. It's all ugly and meaningless. And shrill.

Look at TV commercials, print ads, press releases, powerpoints, political speeches with that standard in mind. Question what things mean--especially when they're repeated like trump's flatulence.

Finally, there's a brief in the passage I pasted. You'll find it from the second part of the excerpt above. It's originally from a medieval morality play. "Everyman" (that's you and me) is met by another character, named, "Knowledge."

‘Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, 

In thy most need to go by thy side.’

That's supposed to be what we do in advertising. Help people. When they're in need, go by their side.

Yeah, right.