Copywriters sans frontieres.

"Send me somewhere East of Eden,
Where their best is like our worst.
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments,
And a man can raise a thirst."
--Rudyard Kipling


I am off to the tropical third world, where the tsetse flies fly and yellow fever is all the rage. There I am bringing my copywriting skills to those places and climes less fortunate, where the construction of a simple classified ad to sell a diseased goat can
disable a village for a month. Look for some award winners from our little brown brothers.

There's something happening here.

Since 1980 and the rise of Radical Reagan Rightism, the rise of compassionate conservatism, the number of prisoners in state and federal prisons has increased nearly 500%--in federal prisons alone that rate increase is nearly 700%. Jail population from 1985 to present is a bit of a laggard--it has merely tripled.

These facts I've discovered just a day after the story breaks that J. Edgar Hoover, the freedom-hating protector of our liberty, planned to arrest 12,000 people, 97% of them citizens and keep them in military prisons without access to due process, unprotected by habeas corpus.

Of course, none of this is as important as Britney's sister's pregnancy.

GEIFY. (George Explains It For You.)

Something is happening in America that isn't pleasant to watch. The Presidency is fast becoming an autocracy and our country seems to be in the hands of bloated plutocrats who earn billion dollar payouts while their companies eliminate jobs.

Some have called this period in America's history "the New Gilded Age," referring to the original Gilded Age when people like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Leland Stanford, Huntington, Gould, JP Morgan, Charles Schwab and other amassed fortunes that in today's dollars would overwhelm that of, say, Bill Gates. While these "malefactors of great wealth" were accumulating their millions, there were millions of people living hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck in fetid conditions, without access to health care, education, advancement or workplace protection. In other words, a few were well-off and millions and millions suffered.

Being a country which has no historical sense means that most Americans alive today have no sense of what life was like in America only one century ago. And so, we have taken the progress made due to liberal policy that started during FDR's New Deal and continued through to Johnson's Great Society as the norm. What I call the Liberal Period in America, lasted from 1933 to approximately 1968. During this period we saw a narrowing of the disparity between rich and poor, aggressively progressive taxation, a bridling of corporate influence. We also saw a remarkable rise in our general standard of living. Home ownership reached new heights, as did college attendance and the broad distribution of once-unattainable consumer goods.

Since the Reagan 80s, the trend toward a more egalitarian distribution of wealth has been rolled back. Our public education system has been all but destroyed. Nearly 50 million Americans have no health insurance. Public services, like libraries and other cultural institutions have decayed and in many cases have cut back on the hours they are open. Further the state of our cities and concomitant city services are approaching Dickensian levels. In fact, diseases we had all but eradicated a generation ago are making a comeback. Housing standards, while on the books, are not enforced and millions of people are living in conditions that more liberal eras might have termed inhuman.

Here's my point. If you're reading this, if you grew up after WW2, you grew up during the American anomaly of distributed wealth. Rapacious and exploitative wealth has always been the rule and it is back in force. That rule, by the way can be summed up thus: capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich. I say that because the poor are subject to the whims of the marketplace, while the government is on hand to bailout or support wealth with tax-payer-financed largesses. (Think Halliburton no-bid contracts.) Or what today we call Global capitalism, I call Gobble Capitalism.

What follows by the way was written in 1963 by Alan Greenspan, in Ayn Rand's Ur-Unfettered capitalist newsletter. I'm quoting from Paul Krugman here:

"Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

Greenspan and company have helped run our nation for quite a while. They are running it now. Welcome to the Dark
Ages.
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Bob Herbert of the NYTimes agrees with me, btw. For further elucidation, read his oped piece (which was released after my post.) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/opinion/22herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Here's another one for you.

I heard a promotional announcement on NPR this morning. Some people call these ads, but not Public broadcasting, but let's move on.

This one was for Lufthansa and they were trumpeting their "Lie-flat beds." That got me thinking. Aren't beds, by definition, "lie-flat?" Here's my supposition. Airlines stared calling large seats "beds" even though they were merely reclining seats with footrests. So you had a "bed" shaped like a fallen over Hebrew lahmed, which wasn't really a bed at all. That verbal hocus-pocus has now forced the language to append an adjective (lie-flat) where none has been needed before in the history of English.

I look forward to more of these in the future. As linguistic lies become more and more pervasive--factories producing pollution from their plants which they'll call "pure oxygen," so air will soon need the modifier "breathable." You get the point, yes?
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HOLIDAY SPECIAL COMING SOON.

A special post is coming soon. I'm calling it GEIFY, pronounced "guy fee." Geify is my acronym for George Explains It For You. I will put order into the universe and with other-worldly-like luminescence will bring serenity to your soul and a beatific smile to your lips. Either that or outrage.

There are no black people in the future.

In our scrupulously PC world we have figured out ways to code language and image so what we show and say is "acceptable" but is just as virulently racist as the epithets that scarred our nation for so many years. As Reagan advisor and right-wing hero Lee Atwater noted, we no longer yell "nigger, nigger, nigger," we proclaim "state's rights." America's nativist, anti-semitic beliefs are couched in politesse, like "Eastern liberals," or "New York intellectuals."

I've noticed that architectural renderings of future developments portend a world without darker hues. Why is this? It's probably not intentional, but the message is loud and clear. To so many, utopia is white. And has a shapely ass.

The economics of rudeness.

Last night I had to send my Sony Vaio back to Sony for repair. Their middleman in this process is FedEx-Kinkos. I was told to drop by with a service number and the FedEx people would take care of the rest. Uh huh.

FedEx, who forged its early image of efficiency by NOT being the Post Office has become the Post Office. The lines, which were long and meandered like Dick Cheney's colon, were disorderly. They were out of supplies (like envelopes)and no one knew what I was talking about when I said I was there for a Sony repair.

Finally, one FedEx guy came to my aid. He found the appropriate box, had me pack it and then processed the order and charged me $10.84 for the box. He seemed the very model of a modern retail worker. Except he did everything wrong. Finally his boss came and reprocessed the whole thing, which took an additional twenty minutes not counting ten more minutes to refund my $10.84.

My question is this. What are the economics of hiring low-wage workers, offering them no advancement path, no training, no management so they deliver nothing more than lousy service and high-turnover? This "hire the cheapest" philosophy infects every business--T-mobile, Delta Rapelines, supermarkets, drug stores, FedEx-Kinkos. Can someone explain this? Does it make sense to alienate customers and tarnish your brand to, maybe save a few dollars an hour? I say maybe save because I can't even imagine the hourly wage savings compensate for the high-rate of turnover these businesses suffer.

If you know an MBA, an economist or a Ayn Randian crypto-fascist, will you please ask them? I would like to know.

I snapped this walking back from lunch. Neither of the 6'2" twin Lithuanian supermodels I was with got it, but it made me laugh.

Undone by language.

I might be galloping hither and yon in this one, so try to hold onto the reins and stay aboard, he said mixing his metaphors. Last week an unnamed client of mine "bought" what in my mind was an innovative and unique idea to provide relevant content to its customer base.

Now the word content is the first word I will examine. To most people, particularly webophiles, content is any bucket-load of crap that pertains, however loosely, to a topic. It does not have to be interesting, funny, fresh, original or authoritative. It just has to be there. There are many in the industry who say "content is king." Tru dat, but only if it's interesting and unique. Most content is crap. Crap with a capital K. It's just a hodgepodge of crap or moving images meant to show the client, the only person outside of a creative's 360-review-group who will spend time on the site, how much stuff is on the site. When the client, and most clients are so distracted by fear that, honestly, I don't believe they can read, sees a bucket-full of drivel the agency calls content, the client remarks, "look at all that content." It is at that point that the client proclaims the site robust and wields her cliches like a Viking double-sided broadaxe. "The content is rich and our site is robust." At that point there's not a single person within axe-length who will ask, "Oh, it's full of stuff all right, but is that stuff interesting?" That would be considered by agencies and clients alike to be controversial and inflammatory. And would probably, eventually get you shit-canned.

Gerry Graf, the creative doyen of TBWA/CD NY, is video interviewed in the ever- star-fucking Creativity magazine this month. He doesn't have much to say but what is important. He can say what's important in ten seconds--but that's too short to qualify as content so the video runs and runs until Graf repeats himself about nine times. Basically, Graf says, a commercial isn't any good if people have seen it before. In other words, if it ain't interesting it's just a continuing onslaught of panicked pixelled pusillanimity.

Now, let's talk specifically about web agencies for a minute. "Dear Web Agencies: sixteen months ago I found a statistic that said there are over 600 billion web pages in the world, ergo there are probably 700 or 800 billion pages today. Must you produce more and more filled with crap no one cares about outside of a conference room? My god. Aggregation is not work. It's taking a bunch of someone else's crap and calling it your own. It's kind of like going to twenty restaurants and taking portions of meals from each, mixing them together in a Cuisinart and re-serving it up with your client's logo attached. Would you pardon me while I retch."

OK. I've got one more phrase to cover in this philippic. "Soft launch." The client doesn't feel something is ready so they, in the feckless, fuck-faced farce of fuckdom decide on a "soft launch." A launch that's not really a launch. Think of it as a soft amputation. A soft pregnancy. Soft genital herpes. Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Client. A soft launch is soft-headed. And a new-speak excuse for half-assed.

Robust, my ass.

I am so nauseated by the use of the word "robust." Everything that is full of content nowadays, everything that may have a scintilla of interest is referred to as robust. Dear boys and girls, there are other words out there. Robust is over-used, hackneyed and a cliche.

The Red Tag Sale.

GM is having a red tag sale. That's good. Because there are probably more people who want red tags than GM vehicles.

What is amazing to me is the absolute and utter lack of retail innovation on the part of GM. All they do is the same old asinine (or asieleven) sales tactic,one that, at best, denigrates any price integrity they have left.

Years ago, when I was knee-high to a cockroach, I worked in the advertising department at Bloomingdale's. These were pre-computer days, and the ad you dreaded "writing" above all others was for Levellor blinds--because you had to type the chart of lengths and widths and prices that took a bad typist like myself forever. I bring this up because periodically, when the US had a government, the blind buyer would be sued by the FCC because Levellor blinds are always on sale. Like mattresses and American cars. If you're always on sale, the sale price becomes your regular price and you can't then advertise things at 50% off. So, once or twice a year, usually a day before a holiday where Bloomingdale's was closed, the blind buyer would sell every blind at its regular price, thus averting the long hand of the law. Or avoiding the letter of the law.

GM and other domestics, because of their political influence and heft, don't need such subterfuge. However customers know. The few cars they do buy they buy during a red-tag sale, or president's day sale, or ground-hog's day sale. So, GM can put an MSRP of $20K on a car, but no one in their right mind will ever buy a car at that price.

It's a fire sale in Detroit.Which is fitting. Since most of that once-great city is in ashes.

(Oops. I just check GM's corporate site. It's a red tag EVENT, not a sale.)