Friday, July 3rd, 2009
She ought to be barfing in her sweater.
To see a textbook case of both commodity fetishism and the general sickness of corporate capitalism, keep an eye out for Procter & Gamble’s appalling “Feel More” marketing campaign on behalf of its Downy fabric softener brand.
The ads and promotions emerging from P & G’s campaign encourage people to interpret use of this trivial-at-best, ecologically inexcusable, and probably toxicologically dangerous product as an expression of and gateway to their deepest bonds and emotions.
Equally sick and preposterous is the campaign’s further suggestion that “fabric softener” is some kind of defense against the heightening ravages of the very investors-first system that foists this Earth- and health-endangering shit on us.
“With all the uncertainty around us today, it’s more important than ever for each of us to take solace and find pleasure in the simple things in life. Consumers have really resonated with our message,” said Marty Vanderstelt, brand manager for Downy North America.
You have to worry about the future of a culture in which the dominant behavioral influencers scientifically study ways to convince people that dumping chloroform, pentance, benzyl acetate, and dipalmitoylethyl hydroxyethylmonium methosulfate in your heated appliances and on your clothes is one of “the simple things in life.”
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
Alas, it’s only “bipartisan” among that puny, powerless group known as the entire voting public:
So, half of Republicans now favor Medicare for All. Think about that.
What is our glorious President Change and his magnificent Party doing about that, armed as they are with not only a 90-percent mandate among their own party members, but a clear majority of the opposition? Why, they’re continuing to search for a “bi-partisan” answer — in the U.S. Senate, of course.
This is a major proof of Uncle Whiskers’ old point about the state being the executive committee of the ruling class. Our ruling class is too unhinged and out-of-control to cede anything that suggests your right to live is separate from your status as a piece of “human capital.”
Conclusions?
Obama is 100 percent part of the problem, not the solution. Collaboration is his middle name. He is an epic disaster, a sick joke, a Reaganesque plague upon the nation.
Worse, our always deeply hamstrung system of self-government is now utterly broken. What more proof do you need? Jesus Palomino — half of Republicans already favor Medicare for All, yet that obvious and easy and massively popular policy remains “off the table”!!!!!
Time for a new social movement, a new president, and a new Constitution. Time to stop being fooled by political marketers. Time to make sure the 2010s will make the 1960s look like the 1950s.
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Hi! I'm 85!
This, my friends, is 85-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt! Gloria is, of course, not just mommy to the journalistic cipher Anderson Cooper, but also the never-laboring heiress-socialite great granddaughter of railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the fine figures who helped ensure that rail transport in the USA would be privately owned and widely despised, rather than publicly provided and widely beloved.
I hereby nominate Gloria as the official 21st-century cover-girl for our corporate overclass. She’s just absolutely perfect! Way decrepit and long past any pretense to vigor, she epitomizes the de rigueur look of our times: The dyed, implanted fake hair. The scramble for each and every possible plastic-surgical denial of reality. The vapid self-satisfaction and outdated posings in the face of blatant irrelevance and onrushing death.
Sublime, isn’t it?
And Lady Glo isn’t just the perfect looker. She even seems to be channeling and verbalizing the core thoughts of her social class-mates, young and old alike: “I’m determined to be the best I can be for as long as I can, and when I’m not, I have my plans.”
Well, bravo, hmm, hmm! How true-to-life can one possibly be, hmm, hmm?
One catches the general principle at work (and I use that word “work” ironically) here. It’s a slight adaptation of old Corny’s classic admission about class power and the (non-)rule of law: Reality? What care I about reality? Hain’t I got the money?
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Mr. Orlov is one of the most penetrating and stimulating thinkers out there.
I highly recommend reading through his blogged version of his recent talk in Ireland.
Friday, June 12th, 2009
While stuck watching the profoundly moronic and outdated Belmont Stakes in my apartment’s exercise room last weekend, I encountered E-Trade’s notorious “black baby” commercials. I almost fell off my treadmill.
Watch this appalling shit here and here.
As the white baby controls all aspects of the situation and voices all the reasoned thoughts, the black baby sings, trips out, echoes white logic, and makes a sexual come-on. Can you imagine these ads getting made and aired if the skin colors were reversed? No chance in hell.
I guarantee you that all of this was carefully planned by E-Trade’s marketing team. As I documented in my book, The Consumer Trap, big business marketers are extremely sensitive to racial stereotypes, and are driven by the logic of their enterprise to exploit and perpetuate, not challenge, them.
The other important aspect of this blatant neo-racism is that it is targeted at elite audiences, who absolutely eat it up, not least because they think it’s a great thing for they themselves to be willing even to look at and possibly, maybe interact with a black person (both acts they have only recently begun to contemplate).
The truth, of course, is that contrary to long-running claims that Joe Sixpack is the source of all benightedness, our lovely overclass has always held by far the worst and least accurate view of human beings and human affairs.
