Archive for April, 2008
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Cadillac Parallax: “High School with Money”
Cadillac, the second-most disgusting (after Hummer) branch of General Motors, is running a new television ad for its rolling super-atrocity, the Escalade “SUV.”
In the new ad, the snotty, moronic driver comments about how, now that he’s gone ahead and bought himself an Escalade, he can finally come out and say what everybody knows: At bottom, life is really just “high school with money.”
This, of course, is a focus-group-tested enticement to those who might afford the Escalade’s $57,000+ price-tag to indulge themselves by — as the jackass in the ad says — “graduating” into the reality of acquisitive trampling embodied in this awful product.
Now, it’s not often that corporate marketing messages convey much truth. Yet, at least this one time, I do think there’s something quite true, if only unintentionally so, to be seen here: The “high school with money” line strikes me as being a rather powerful description of the social psychology of the American overclass and its upper-middle-class fringes.
If you doubt this, I would challenge you to go into a yupper-class neighborhood and spend a few hours observing the words, actions, and physiognomies of the clipped, flippant, spoiled, self-indulgent little seekers the system attracts into its top positions. These Biffs and Buffies do indeed behave like a pack of rollicking 17-year-old partyers. Hell, with all the sweatsuits, the ball-caps, the hot rods, and the near-universal huffing-up of Botox and hair dye, they even LOOK like a clique of narcissistic hallway debs and jock/bullies, albeit rather ghoulish, cadaverish ones.
And, just like real high-school brats, they also have utterly, absolutely no idea that their world might turn out to be anything other than natural and timeless. Clueless is as clueless does.
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Medical Quiz
Q: Where does a person have to wait 13 months to obtain a physical exam by a medical doctor, if that person can even get into that doctor’s closed-to-new-patients practice?
A: Massachusetts, home of the “market” version of universal health insurance.
Q: What percentage of the previously uninsured are now insured under Massachusetts’ “market” version of “universal” health insurance?
A: 57%
Q: Why does this fraudulent train wreck in Massachusetts matter?
A: It’s what the “major” candibots are promising to “deliver” to us nationally.
Source: The New York Times, April 5, 2008
Friday, April 4th, 2008
Obama Hashes MLK
Fresh off yet another paean to Ronald Reagan, and not long after trashing his own minister for saying that racism and illegal U.S. wars exist, Barack Obama chose today, the 40th anniversary of the most tragic assassination in American history, to make nonsense of the life and struggles of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Here’s Obama’s general explanation:
The struggle for economic justice remains an unfinished part of the King legacy because the dream is still out of reach for too many Americans.
So, in other words, Obama’s version boils down to this: Once you’ve reached “economic justice” for yourself, you’ve “reached” MLK’s dream.
What misrepresentation, in both directions. Not only does Mr. Obama shrink Dr. King’s inherently collective dream of a fair, egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful society down to the size of a raisin the sun, but, by making the “dream” about mere personal economic comfort, he once again does exactly what his massively over-rated “race speech” did — it lets the smug and the comfortable off the hook for their own share of our collective situation. “I’m comfortable, so Dr. King’s dream is real for me!”
At best, this reduces MLK’s dream (which was actually a challenge, if you have an ear and a brain) to the long-running, insipid, selfish “American dream” propaganda line. That particular dogma has always been designed to get people to take their suburban possessions as a reason to abandon all but the most stupid and apathetic form of ethics and politics.
But, wait. As always with the “major” candibots, it gets worse. Not only does Obama want to shrink MLK down to his own puny scale, but he blatantly tries get you to believe that his own past, present, and future sell-outs are somehow compatible with anything MLK ever said or did. King called for democratic socialism and honest racial reconciliation in America. Meanwhile, here’s what Obama would have you think he called for:
that we’ll be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable health care when we get sick, that we’ll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we’ll be able to retire with security
“Affordable” health care? Seriously? No wonder Obama feels compelled to call MLK’s prescriptions — demands for a society-wide “radical redistribution of economic power” and genuine, practical repair of the crushing damages of racial slavery and Jim Crow — “modest dreams.”
But, wait. It gets even worse than this! It couldn’t possibly be a speech by an aspiring “mainstream” politician without this steaming pile of de rigeur excrement, could it?:
While Obama talked about increasing the number of police on the streets, expanding after-school and other programs and rebuilding the economy to give young people alternatives to crime and hope for the future, he also told the public that government can’t do everything.
“Men, you have to take care of your children,” he said, noting that his own father left him and his mother when he was two.
Echoing an issue that former Vice President Dan Quayle was ridiculed for when he raised it in the early 1990s, Obama said that parents must marry.
Here, the words won Obama a standing ovation.
“One of the forgotten aspects of Dr. King’s legacy is how he demanded personal responsibility as well as societal responsibility,” Obama said.
From the mountaintop to the toilet bowl…
Friday, April 4th, 2008
MLK: Behind the Marketing
April 4, 1968 is a very strong candidate for the most important day in U.S. history.
That day deprived the nation of a figure who, at the politically tender age of 39, was threatening to bring the country to the point of beginning to discuss social class as a problem needing redress; to do so in a way that made clear its centrality in the millions of lives that have been shattered by racism in this society; and to do so in a powerful democratic, indigenous, and multi-racial idiom.
“It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters … but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” (MLK, February 1968)
You won’t learn any of this by surrendering yourself to the corporate media or the mainstream candibots, of course. There, the real MLK is anathema, despite the saccharine platitudinous advertising/speechifying they grudgingly trot out on days like today. The real purpose of such pitches is not just to cloak the overclass in the garb of “tolerance,” but also to distort and conceal the true message and dream in question. That dream was about actual, practical equality, not just verbal kindnesses. To date, there has been no greater threat to the scandalous, murderous, illegitimate, rampaging power of the rich in this, the engine and armada of corporate capitalism.
If you doubt this, take a look at these amazing, blatant red-baiting dismissals from CNN:
- Story Highlights
- Before his death, King had become radical, scholars and activists say
- The revolutionary “Poor People’s Campaign” alarmed King’s closest advisers
- Campaign aimed to withdraw funding for Vietnam War and abolish poverty
- King also angered his most important ally, President Lyndon Johnson
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Making Munichs for Marketers: The Limits of “Consumer” Activism
Remember the much-ballyhooed tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, the ones that were supposed to cripple Big Tobacco and then slowly starve it of new smokers?
Guess what?
1. Since the end of the publicity blitz surrounding the lawsuits, the U.S. teen smoking rate, the key to the industry’s future domestic profits, has stopped falling, and stayed steady at a substantially high level.
2. The U.S.-based tobacco corporations are about finished restructuring themselves to shield their extremely profitable global operations from U.S.-based penalties.
This is what happens when “consumer” activists do what they normally do, which is struggle mightily to summon the courage to offer their opponents what Neville Chamberlain offered Hitler. Afraid of connecting the dots between the three c-words — class, capitalism, and “consumers” — the aspiring anti-powers-that-be invariably fail to acknowledge that the weeds they are trying to pluck have roots. As a result, they invariably yield mere appeasements, rather than adequate, lasting changes.
Consider the similar case of “consumer” activists’ efforts to draw corporate food marketers to meet them in Munich about eroding childhood nutrition. A couple years back, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood threatened to sue the Kellogg Company over its unyielding peddling of a wide variety of marketing-friendly (high flavor, low nutrition) foods to the increasingly obese U.S. population of children.
The threat extracted a settlement.
Q: How much better has this settlement proven to be than Chamberlain’s famous piece of paper?
A: None.
The document itself begins by permitting Kellogg to promulgate extreme falsehoods about itself:
“We remain first and foremost committed,” its opening paragraph reads, “to meeting our consumers’ changing needs.”
This massive lie begs two questions:
1. If “consumer” needs are king, why is it necessary for “watchdogs” to police Kellogg’s behavior?
2. If putting “our consumers’” (note the possessive formulation) needs ahead of Kellogg investors’ interests were ever actually adopted as actual company policy, how many minutes it would take Kellogg shareholders to eject their derelict board of directors?
In reality, as any glance at kids’ TV will confirm, all the settlement did was tweak Kellogg’s advertising strategies slightly. Most often, they simply tack on some unrealistic pep-talk about “getting outside” for 15 minutes, as if that will either work or compensate for their shameful promotion of junk foods.
One other effect of the Kellogg/CSPI/CCFC settlement has been voluntary adoption of similar marketing “guidelines” by other corporations.
The meaningfulness of such progress can be gleaned from one of the products that Kraft Foods’ Post Cereal division now sells as part of its “Sensible Solutions” program. Here you go, health food enthusiasts:
Part of a “balanced” society? Go ask Adolf…
