House of Eratosthenes

We were getting ready to check out of a hotel yesterday morning and there was some kind of zit ointment commercial on the teevee. I was intrigued by the expensive-looking computer graphic that showed the goop working its way into the facial pores and cleaning the crap out of it, sending the detritus up to the surface so it could be washed away. And then it used the remaining fifteen seconds for some gorgeous female to croon away about its wonderful glittering attributes. First adjective she used was “creamy”; this is what piqued my interest.

I was not quite so much intrigued by the lack of coordination. Although there was that, obviously; creamy things can’t be counted on to sink into the pores of your face. It was the mindlessness. Obviously, I would have to blog this phenomenon of universal, glittering generalities that are used to sell things.

– Creamy
– Toll free phone numbers repeated three or four times in rapid succession
– 4g
– Green
– Personal advisor/counselor/trainer/representative/tutor just for you!!!

These are just some of the verbals. Year by year, they change somewhat. The visuals are more entrenched and stabilized: Young, healthy, young, good-looking, young, attractive, young, full of pep, young, perky, and young. Did I say young? Also, women winning arguments with their stubborn, stupid, clumsy and insensitive but well-intentioned husbands & boyfriends. That is how you sell your crap. Young beautiful people, man uses brand X, woman tells him how to do it right, green, good for the environment, creamy and personal trainer devoted just to you.

First question I have is: How do I blog this without picking on the girls? Clearly, men don’t give a flying fig about creamy, and any fool can plainly see a man is not made more receptive to the prospect of buying something by the idea that his wife or girlfriend is going to humiliate him in public yet another time. The tutor who burns up all this time on one thing and on absolutely nothing else is obviously cobbled together to churn up some female appeal. Rare is the man who will stoop to being shown how to do something; and, I daresay, the one who is excited about such a thing has yet to be born. The 4g network does have some appeal for us, we pine for lost youth just like our female counterparts, albeit not in the same way perhaps. Just as many men are snobbish about the environment and want to be “green” so they can say they’re better than the next guy, more worthy of continuing to live here.

But by and large, I said, commercials are not made for men, they’re made for women. Nobody’s going out of business any time soon for having failed to attract enough male clientele, not as far as teevee advertising is concerned.

My fiance offered up the situation with pickup truck commercials. I had to give her that one. This truck is tough! Grrrr! But then again…after we checked out and mingled with the traffic, there were a lot of Big! Tough! Grrrr! trucks out there, not being used to pull tree stumps or transport cords of wood, just tootling down the road. Sitting way up high. Being safe. Feeling invulnerable…and driving in such a manner as to reflect that, should a collision occur, Number One would come out of it just fine. The other driver would be screwed. But the pilot of the larger vessel would likely not even know anything happened. Like a nine hundred foot long cruise ship running over an otter or something.

And that fantasy, ladies and gentlemen, is a chick thing. Oooo…safety safety safety, I feel so safe. Point is, maybe even the “Truck! Big! Tough! Grrrr!” message has some gender-neutral appeal, even some feminine appeal.

But I don’t care. The “arms race” with larger and larger vehicles is certainly not a good thing, but to me this is a secondary matter. The thing that really makes me think modern civilization is boned is — no, not “creamy” — it is the special-tutor-just-for-you thing.

This just might not help, in some situations.

And it might hurt.

There is a skill we are talking about here, that is important but doesn’t get a lot of attention because it doesn’t have a name. It is roughly analogous to the skill involved in climbing on to a merry-go-round without anyone stopping it for you. Let the world function in whatever way it will; learn all you can about it anyway.

I’m not even that worried that the skill is in a state of steep decline. If it were just a decline, we’d bottom out with it at some point. The marketplace of ideas would take care of it. Someone would say “nobody seems to be doing this, perhaps if I refine a skill here, this is how I can make my way in the world.” My concern is that the skill is not valued. My concern is that, parents are seeing their children are incapable of learning anything until there’s a “special instructor just for him!” — and that’s quite alright. Sign up that tutor. Get the medication prescription filled. Who cares about such a crippling dependency when the wonderful services are there to take care of it all…it’s like a does-the-tree-make-a-noise thing.

And I really don’t like seeing all these bushels of crap getting sold with this “special [blank] just for you who doesn’t attend to anything else in any way” deal. That looks, to me, like…I feel special with all these resources consumed just for me, me, me. It’s the polar opposite of the environmentally-conscious thing, is it not? Leave a tiny footprint over there, and a big one over here. I count, because this person’s (or these people’s) time got all burned up on me and my problems, and absolutely nothing else.

Looks like a cognitive dissonance taking place. People want to be a certain thing, but they don’t want to admit, even to themselves, that this is what they want to be.

Yeah, the “this product is extra special custom made for your unique, one in 3.5 billion bad self” ones really get me.

As do the ones portraying any car as anything more than a comfortable, relatively safe way to get from point A to point B, with A/C and a decent stereo. Lightning flashing, images of how joyful and exciting, your life will be once you get this car, how many hot chicks will turn their heads …

Last night the wife had one of those “fix the house up to sell it” shows on, and they cut an existing marble countertop into three pieces to re-use in a different way. And the guy who did it says “look at how we re-used that. How green are we?”

And I’m sittin’ there thinkin’ … correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t marble a rock? Throwing marble in a landfill doesn’t hurt the environment. It’s just a fancy rock in a land fill. It’s better than a Swiffer mop head.
- philmon | 03/28/2011 @ 06:54
“How green are we?”

As in…look at us, we deserve some kind of trophy. We are the all-time champions of not consuming, not leaving an imprint, or any evidence of our existence anywhere. Nobody else even comes close in this game of being insignificant.

Thousands of years from now, people will sing the praises of us, and not you, because we managed to snag the booby prize…or, they would sing our praises if they could remember who we were. Which, they won’t.
- mkfreeberg | 03/28/2011 @ 07:33

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Memo For File CXXXIV
Sunday, March 27th, 2011