But sort of, and only in a manner that gives me an excuse to rage against pollution in general and then specifically against the way the Magilla from Wasilla emits pollution like a garbage truck in need of a ring job.
Sarah says global warming is real, but we can't necessarily pin it on man-made causes. I agree. The fact is, we cannot know. The earth is a big, old place and it has had ice-ages and Devonian heat-waves in its own seemingly whimsical Can't-Fool-Mother-Nature way for about four billion years. If the temperature generally rises 3 degrees and causes the ice caps to melt, it may be a disaster for us but for the Earth (or Gaia if you must), it's not much more than the feeling you'd get if you broke a sweat trying to catch the bus.
That said, I see no connection whatever between the argument that the earth is/is not warming because of us, and the real outrage that ought to be inspired by the multi-stage environmental disasters we know we are causing, and which are at best depressing and often enough mind-blowing in their rank awfulness.
Sure, Gaia doesn't care whether the Siberian Tiger makes it to the year 2050. But I do. And I know we are causing it to die off because we keep cutting down its forested habitat. Of course we can't know if Antarctica is turning into a palm-fronded paradise because of us. But we do know that the Amazon is getting burned down, and that sludge in the water is killing children there, and that wonderful new species of plants and animals are being discovered there only as they are being destroyed in a sickening quest for cheaper burger-beef (even though I love The King of BK fame).
It may be true that Al Gore is Chicken Little. I never thought he was brilliant (he never seemed bright compared to Clinton, anyway), nor that he really had made a convincing case just because he knew how to use scary pictures in a pedantic manner. But to me, Global Warming isn't the point. The genuine tragedy is the destruction of habitat and species that we KNOW is our fault.
Make no mistake: of course we need to survive as a species--we claim that right and I support it and even support species bigotry because that's as natural as a lion's quest for breakfast. But I don't support wanton destruction of beautiful, complex natural habitats only to replace them with crude dwellings and cheap crap amusements and dimwitted, potbellied nincompoops complaining the Liberals are out to get them and that Sarah Palin's their six-pack-totin' gal. No.
And in a further note on this woman's eternal gift for glaring tackiness, let us briefly review the crude manner in which she blotted out the name of the Man Who Made Her Queen on the silly sun visor she was wearing at the beach in the State That Had Too Many Hawaiians while wearing a vapid, vituperative shirt that said "If You Don't Love America, Why Don't You Get the Hell Out"?
To which I would answer: Sarah, you are not America. You actually don't love the real America--the multi-racial, multi-cultural one that exists today. So why don't you get the hell out? Alaska would be far enough, and keep your stupid mouth shut while you're at it.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
One Hundred Years Ago. . .
. . .your great grandparents were in their prime (do you know who their parents were? and isn't it bone-chilling to realize you may not, and that your own full, passionate life may be subject to the same oblivion but a hundred years hence?).
Please read on, fellow mortal.
Your great grandparents, probably without understanding exactly why, were standing at the portals of a momentous period we have come to call "The American Century". That century has come to an end. The 21st got started with awful news from Dade County and then worse news from the corner of Liberty and Church in Lower Manhattan, followed by even worse news a couple of blocks south at the corner of Wall and Broad just across from where a certain American General was sworn in as the nation's first Commander in Chief. Obama may be President today, but he's inherited a deflated-balloon of a nation hissing out its remaining air in a way that sounds an awful lot like the mindless drone of tea-baggers and other ill-tempered opponents to common-sense.
But hope cannot be lost if we look back on what was going on a hundred years ago, when the prospects for the nation loomed great, but when the United States, culturally at least, was unsound and notably laggard--perhaps much as it is today.
Here are a few examples of what made the papers (ref: "America's Taste 1859 -1959, NYT Books):
1908: New York Camera Club Ousts Alfred Steiglitz
They accused him of malfeasance but he said the reason was they just objected to his realism. They called him and his followers "the Mop and Pail crew", mocking their penchant for photographing the city's streets and its people. For quite some time, cubism's forward-looking works on canvas could be seen only at Steiglitz' New York Studio. Incidentally, Picasso's earth-shaking "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" with its distorted monstrous nude ladies with African masks was revealed to a generally horrified public in 1906.
1906: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is panned by the critics but becomes a best-seller anyway.
"I aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach" said Sinclair (who also authored "Oil!" upon which the Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "There Will Be Blood" was based). For those who don't know, "The Jungle" is a novel about labor injustice and woefully poor hygiene in the meatpacking industry. Apparently the latter descriptions were so disgusting that the public grew outraged and soon insisted upon, and got, the US government to inspect food processing and keep it at least effectively clean enough not to sicken any noticeable percentage of those who partook. Sinclair had in addition hoped to spur similar outrage at the labor malfeasance thereat, but as any Mexican working in a chicken-parts factory knows, this part of the outrage never became as popular with a feasting American public.
1903: Carrie A. Nation is jailed.
Her axe-wielding quote: "You have taken me in as a lamb but I shall come out as a lion". And thus was born the movement that would eventually become an ignominious chapter in our history known as Prohibition; and concomitantly we'd see the rise of a ruling class of Gangsters in America. What Carrie couldn't understand was that you can't stop people from ingesting what they want (see above) no matter what method with which you regale them or punish them. Carrie A. Nation, an Oklahoma girl, had in her later years decided, it seems, that Demon Alcohol was the ruin of lives and families and that alcohol-bars must be cut up with axes. She may have had a point. But it is a little known fact that she was equally and as vociferously against "fraternal orders" such as the Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and probably, if they had existed, Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Club. One imagines these groups were far more influential then than now--or perhaps we just don't realize what they are up to these days (Skull and Bones anyone?). I know I haven't a clue. Having discovered this latter nugget of information, I must admit, is forcing me to give old Carrie a second look.
Finally, and this is about inflation:
1909: Holbein Portrait sells for $400,000--a scandalous sum for a painting at the time.
Now of course we would be well into the multi-millions for same. Fifty million? Maybe. But $400,000! Today you might get a weatherbeaten Manhattan co-op with a view of the air shaft for that much, provided you could convince the bank you really didn't need the money in which case they would guardedly lend it to you (still owing all that TARP money to the government).
So, while we might still be driving the bus in the ditch, we can safely consider ourselves well ahead of our great grandparents in some ways. For instance, there is no chance they carried around supercomputers in their pockets. Nor would they have been lucky enough to be able to argue about universal health care (in an age when "dropsy" was a significant ailment).
In any case, why is everyone so excited about any of these? A hundred years from now it will all seem so quaint.
Please read on, fellow mortal.
Your great grandparents, probably without understanding exactly why, were standing at the portals of a momentous period we have come to call "The American Century". That century has come to an end. The 21st got started with awful news from Dade County and then worse news from the corner of Liberty and Church in Lower Manhattan, followed by even worse news a couple of blocks south at the corner of Wall and Broad just across from where a certain American General was sworn in as the nation's first Commander in Chief. Obama may be President today, but he's inherited a deflated-balloon of a nation hissing out its remaining air in a way that sounds an awful lot like the mindless drone of tea-baggers and other ill-tempered opponents to common-sense.
But hope cannot be lost if we look back on what was going on a hundred years ago, when the prospects for the nation loomed great, but when the United States, culturally at least, was unsound and notably laggard--perhaps much as it is today.
Here are a few examples of what made the papers (ref: "America's Taste 1859 -1959, NYT Books):
1908: New York Camera Club Ousts Alfred Steiglitz
They accused him of malfeasance but he said the reason was they just objected to his realism. They called him and his followers "the Mop and Pail crew", mocking their penchant for photographing the city's streets and its people. For quite some time, cubism's forward-looking works on canvas could be seen only at Steiglitz' New York Studio. Incidentally, Picasso's earth-shaking "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" with its distorted monstrous nude ladies with African masks was revealed to a generally horrified public in 1906.
1906: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is panned by the critics but becomes a best-seller anyway.
"I aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach" said Sinclair (who also authored "Oil!" upon which the Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "There Will Be Blood" was based). For those who don't know, "The Jungle" is a novel about labor injustice and woefully poor hygiene in the meatpacking industry. Apparently the latter descriptions were so disgusting that the public grew outraged and soon insisted upon, and got, the US government to inspect food processing and keep it at least effectively clean enough not to sicken any noticeable percentage of those who partook. Sinclair had in addition hoped to spur similar outrage at the labor malfeasance thereat, but as any Mexican working in a chicken-parts factory knows, this part of the outrage never became as popular with a feasting American public.
1903: Carrie A. Nation is jailed.
Her axe-wielding quote: "You have taken me in as a lamb but I shall come out as a lion". And thus was born the movement that would eventually become an ignominious chapter in our history known as Prohibition; and concomitantly we'd see the rise of a ruling class of Gangsters in America. What Carrie couldn't understand was that you can't stop people from ingesting what they want (see above) no matter what method with which you regale them or punish them. Carrie A. Nation, an Oklahoma girl, had in her later years decided, it seems, that Demon Alcohol was the ruin of lives and families and that alcohol-bars must be cut up with axes. She may have had a point. But it is a little known fact that she was equally and as vociferously against "fraternal orders" such as the Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and probably, if they had existed, Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Club. One imagines these groups were far more influential then than now--or perhaps we just don't realize what they are up to these days (Skull and Bones anyone?). I know I haven't a clue. Having discovered this latter nugget of information, I must admit, is forcing me to give old Carrie a second look.
Finally, and this is about inflation:
1909: Holbein Portrait sells for $400,000--a scandalous sum for a painting at the time.
Now of course we would be well into the multi-millions for same. Fifty million? Maybe. But $400,000! Today you might get a weatherbeaten Manhattan co-op with a view of the air shaft for that much, provided you could convince the bank you really didn't need the money in which case they would guardedly lend it to you (still owing all that TARP money to the government).
So, while we might still be driving the bus in the ditch, we can safely consider ourselves well ahead of our great grandparents in some ways. For instance, there is no chance they carried around supercomputers in their pockets. Nor would they have been lucky enough to be able to argue about universal health care (in an age when "dropsy" was a significant ailment).
In any case, why is everyone so excited about any of these? A hundred years from now it will all seem so quaint.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Full of Monsters
In a recent article in the New York Times, the excellent columnist Olivia Judson (an evolutionary biologist) noted:
". . .there’s no need to invent monsters: you just need to imagine how terrifying it would be if ants were the size of rhinos."
I would like to shout "huzzah" to this and add to the sentiment. My personal belief has long been that the imagination of monsters natural, supernatural and alien springs from the unwieldy, even somewhat catastrophic knowledge the race of humans secretly owns about the near-unimaginable strangeness of thousands of our fellow species here on earth.
Specifically I would like to point out that if one were to spend half an hour looking at any book with close up photographs of common insects, one would have to be convinced that we are living in a world literally crawling with bizarre monsters that feature as much oddity as any we might ever find on any distant planet in our supposed interplanetary future.
Can we hope (or fear) to discover anything anywhere that will be as weird or as creepy as the type of fly that buries its young in the throat of a living deer, and in which its young multiply and fatten, only to fly eventually out of the deer's mouth having mostly destroyed the deer's ability to swallow (leaving it for dead)? Or how about those worms that get into people's eyes and grow gigantic and then slither out of the corners of the poor host's eyes when they feel a need to move on to the next nefarious stage of their squirming, alien existence?
Indeed, review the heads of insects close up with their giant multifaceted eyes and their merciless cutting jaws and read some about their entirely shocking antics--you'll come away shivering with horror; and it will be made worse to know these tiny wretches are currently in the business of making up the majority of the earth's biomass (or perhaps you will fall in love with the little creeps and become a candidate entomologist).
Further, I believe our collective subconscious (let's assume for a moment Jung had a point) registers all this and agrees that we are better served by inventing fantastic versions of these biological realities than by learning in depth about the reality of their biology. This is because, by projecting them out as fantasies, we can put them collectively at a distance and claim they're certainly terrifying but not "real"; and when it comes to science fiction and the hunt for alien life we can even project that they are "far away"; all more comforting fodder than to spend time thinking about the motes in your own eye right now; or the microscopic bugs that infest your pillow (dust mites) that, when blown up to poster size outclass in awfulness the most awful fantasies ever churned out by Hollywood or even folklore.
Ms. Judson's article was partly about the coming Year of Biodiversity and she calls for a "Wild Celebration" of same and I suppose therefore it may be the wrong time for me to be carping about the horror inspired in me by so many of our fellow bio-travelers on this planet (especially the very small ones) stocked so richly with biological wonders.
In any case I certainly hope we never discover any outer-space-creature weirder than any typical insect already on this planet. I don't think I will be able to stand it.
". . .there’s no need to invent monsters: you just need to imagine how terrifying it would be if ants were the size of rhinos."
I would like to shout "huzzah" to this and add to the sentiment. My personal belief has long been that the imagination of monsters natural, supernatural and alien springs from the unwieldy, even somewhat catastrophic knowledge the race of humans secretly owns about the near-unimaginable strangeness of thousands of our fellow species here on earth.
Specifically I would like to point out that if one were to spend half an hour looking at any book with close up photographs of common insects, one would have to be convinced that we are living in a world literally crawling with bizarre monsters that feature as much oddity as any we might ever find on any distant planet in our supposed interplanetary future.
Can we hope (or fear) to discover anything anywhere that will be as weird or as creepy as the type of fly that buries its young in the throat of a living deer, and in which its young multiply and fatten, only to fly eventually out of the deer's mouth having mostly destroyed the deer's ability to swallow (leaving it for dead)? Or how about those worms that get into people's eyes and grow gigantic and then slither out of the corners of the poor host's eyes when they feel a need to move on to the next nefarious stage of their squirming, alien existence?
Indeed, review the heads of insects close up with their giant multifaceted eyes and their merciless cutting jaws and read some about their entirely shocking antics--you'll come away shivering with horror; and it will be made worse to know these tiny wretches are currently in the business of making up the majority of the earth's biomass (or perhaps you will fall in love with the little creeps and become a candidate entomologist).
Further, I believe our collective subconscious (let's assume for a moment Jung had a point) registers all this and agrees that we are better served by inventing fantastic versions of these biological realities than by learning in depth about the reality of their biology. This is because, by projecting them out as fantasies, we can put them collectively at a distance and claim they're certainly terrifying but not "real"; and when it comes to science fiction and the hunt for alien life we can even project that they are "far away"; all more comforting fodder than to spend time thinking about the motes in your own eye right now; or the microscopic bugs that infest your pillow (dust mites) that, when blown up to poster size outclass in awfulness the most awful fantasies ever churned out by Hollywood or even folklore.
Ms. Judson's article was partly about the coming Year of Biodiversity and she calls for a "Wild Celebration" of same and I suppose therefore it may be the wrong time for me to be carping about the horror inspired in me by so many of our fellow bio-travelers on this planet (especially the very small ones) stocked so richly with biological wonders.
In any case I certainly hope we never discover any outer-space-creature weirder than any typical insect already on this planet. I don't think I will be able to stand it.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
OMG It's a Winter Wonderland
Who knew that a longtime Christmas-disliker could have his heart warmed by the snowy, unprepossessing Yule celebrations of a small town on a bluff above the mighty Hudson closer the the Capital than the City?
It happened last night.
The small town--a very, very tiny City in fact--had its annual Christmas Walk last night and nature obliged by lofting great big white flakes down upon the longish Main Street throughout the event, lending it an air of postcardlike perfection. But this small town, this very tiny city, is not just a bypassed burg full of hicks and nincompoops. No, it happens to contain a fair amount of progressives, certified members of the intelligentsia, hip refugees from senseless high rent, and quirky Hudson Valley operatives who've been strumming against the machine for decades.
So the celebration was a happy mix of Santa and odes to the more ancient, more Pagan gods. By this I mean there was not just a teeny tiny parade with Santa sitting atop the back of a Mercedes Benz convertible, but also a dancing Scheherezade in a shopwindow; and in another window, a girl with a dress that had a puppet theater attached to the front of it in which was performed a cloth and stuffing version of the Can-Can. Hot chocolate was served by young folk with multiple piercings; a man walked on stilts and wore a top hat. In the large display window of a pricey mid-century antique store a pair of middle-aged men held forth on fiddle and guitar, one in top hat and tails, the other in a pony-tail almost certainly of Off-the-Pigs vintage (are top hats making a comeback among a certain brand of hipster?) A more traditional hair salon (unforgiveably named "Mane Street") featured a singer of doo-wop and Elvis and gave trinkets to the smaller celebrants.
City Hall had Santa sequestered somewhere warmly inside and the sidewalk was thick with local folks getting their young their rightful meet and greet with the jolly fat man who may well bring them gifts a couple of weeks from now. Bundled brightly in layers of wintry Wal-mart gear, the kids were noticebly asparkle and even the littlest, whom one must assume really had no idea why they were where they were, seemed justifiably amused and many were obviously smitten by the gently falling snow.
There were no chain-store sponsorships nor glad-handing commercial sycophants to mar the small majesty of the tableau.
I bought a handful of old magazines at my favorite store, which seems to be an emporium of all things odd and inexplicable and that plays acid jazz rather loudly, and had some hot chocolate and then went home for dinner. I felt as if, for once, I at least understood why a celebration of the season, well and duly constituted, might be at some point uplifting to a spirit already weary of the dark season upon whose chilly climes we must now embark.
PS there was a hot dog stand that didn't get much business and I think it was the snow. Snow-covered barkers are not much of a draw it would seem. Better that he would sell kettle-corn or elephant-ears or something else already puffy or powdered?
It happened last night.
The small town--a very, very tiny City in fact--had its annual Christmas Walk last night and nature obliged by lofting great big white flakes down upon the longish Main Street throughout the event, lending it an air of postcardlike perfection. But this small town, this very tiny city, is not just a bypassed burg full of hicks and nincompoops. No, it happens to contain a fair amount of progressives, certified members of the intelligentsia, hip refugees from senseless high rent, and quirky Hudson Valley operatives who've been strumming against the machine for decades.
So the celebration was a happy mix of Santa and odes to the more ancient, more Pagan gods. By this I mean there was not just a teeny tiny parade with Santa sitting atop the back of a Mercedes Benz convertible, but also a dancing Scheherezade in a shopwindow; and in another window, a girl with a dress that had a puppet theater attached to the front of it in which was performed a cloth and stuffing version of the Can-Can. Hot chocolate was served by young folk with multiple piercings; a man walked on stilts and wore a top hat. In the large display window of a pricey mid-century antique store a pair of middle-aged men held forth on fiddle and guitar, one in top hat and tails, the other in a pony-tail almost certainly of Off-the-Pigs vintage (are top hats making a comeback among a certain brand of hipster?) A more traditional hair salon (unforgiveably named "Mane Street") featured a singer of doo-wop and Elvis and gave trinkets to the smaller celebrants.
City Hall had Santa sequestered somewhere warmly inside and the sidewalk was thick with local folks getting their young their rightful meet and greet with the jolly fat man who may well bring them gifts a couple of weeks from now. Bundled brightly in layers of wintry Wal-mart gear, the kids were noticebly asparkle and even the littlest, whom one must assume really had no idea why they were where they were, seemed justifiably amused and many were obviously smitten by the gently falling snow.
There were no chain-store sponsorships nor glad-handing commercial sycophants to mar the small majesty of the tableau.
I bought a handful of old magazines at my favorite store, which seems to be an emporium of all things odd and inexplicable and that plays acid jazz rather loudly, and had some hot chocolate and then went home for dinner. I felt as if, for once, I at least understood why a celebration of the season, well and duly constituted, might be at some point uplifting to a spirit already weary of the dark season upon whose chilly climes we must now embark.
PS there was a hot dog stand that didn't get much business and I think it was the snow. Snow-covered barkers are not much of a draw it would seem. Better that he would sell kettle-corn or elephant-ears or something else already puffy or powdered?
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Lost in the Woods Again?
AP--(Oregon)Search on for missing Ore. Christmas tree cutters
C'mon. Really? Really?
I sure hope the diabetic tree-hunter and his non-camper wife get found soon, because they have a couple of kids who are waiting for them to come home.
But really. Is there any way we can convince people to avoid trying the very obviously stupid attractions life can offer? Like, say, carnival games? Or credit card debt at 28% interest? Or going up into the high snowy mountain wilderness hunting for a Christmas tree?
Again, my hopes are riding on those Oregon State helicopters looking for this poor couple. But for heaven's sake, if they get found, they should also be put in stocks in the public square and forced to wear forest-green dunce-caps for at least a full day.
What sort of fatuous impetuosity propelled them to take the family Subaru and go up into the inhospitable snowy wastes of the Cascade Mountains in winter, hoping to find the type of tree associated with pagan Yule celebrations (attached inexplicably to the High Christian Holiday since the Victorian era), but especially the type of tree favored by ancient barbarian Teutons that also happens to grow only at the peaks of wilderness mountains? And especially if one of them were diabetic (one supposes the hunter of exotic trees was also a hunter of Angus Third Pounders)?
I cannot imagine a suitable mindset. Not for a parent. For a loner, or any unattached adult for that matter, fine: go up in the woods, get lost, die if you must, it's your life and your fate alone. But if you've got a couple of kids at home, and you drive off into the wilderness looking for a very temporary living room decoration in the middle of winter, you are probably a perfect idiot. Proof? Here is the proof: last year the same couple got stuck for four hours in the Cascadian Siskiyou forest also looking for a Christmas tree. So this year they figured, why not try it again? And let's hope for their kids' sake they get real lucky again, with the search helicopters burning taxpayer fuel droning on and on and on. . .
On a related note, a recent story in Science News (on line) noted that snowflakes can sometimes be triangular and the microscopic photos of same were, in the true sense of the word, wonderful.
Small comfort for the frostbitten.
Finally, a totally unrelated note. I have noticed that the Google Ads appearing in this blog seem to mistake my mention of Republicans and right wingers for support--and therefore, there seem no small number of ads for Palin's book or donation to the gubernatorial efforts of the Texan Kaye Bailey Hutchinson. No comment.
C'mon. Really? Really?
I sure hope the diabetic tree-hunter and his non-camper wife get found soon, because they have a couple of kids who are waiting for them to come home.
But really. Is there any way we can convince people to avoid trying the very obviously stupid attractions life can offer? Like, say, carnival games? Or credit card debt at 28% interest? Or going up into the high snowy mountain wilderness hunting for a Christmas tree?
Again, my hopes are riding on those Oregon State helicopters looking for this poor couple. But for heaven's sake, if they get found, they should also be put in stocks in the public square and forced to wear forest-green dunce-caps for at least a full day.
What sort of fatuous impetuosity propelled them to take the family Subaru and go up into the inhospitable snowy wastes of the Cascade Mountains in winter, hoping to find the type of tree associated with pagan Yule celebrations (attached inexplicably to the High Christian Holiday since the Victorian era), but especially the type of tree favored by ancient barbarian Teutons that also happens to grow only at the peaks of wilderness mountains? And especially if one of them were diabetic (one supposes the hunter of exotic trees was also a hunter of Angus Third Pounders)?
I cannot imagine a suitable mindset. Not for a parent. For a loner, or any unattached adult for that matter, fine: go up in the woods, get lost, die if you must, it's your life and your fate alone. But if you've got a couple of kids at home, and you drive off into the wilderness looking for a very temporary living room decoration in the middle of winter, you are probably a perfect idiot. Proof? Here is the proof: last year the same couple got stuck for four hours in the Cascadian Siskiyou forest also looking for a Christmas tree. So this year they figured, why not try it again? And let's hope for their kids' sake they get real lucky again, with the search helicopters burning taxpayer fuel droning on and on and on. . .
On a related note, a recent story in Science News (on line) noted that snowflakes can sometimes be triangular and the microscopic photos of same were, in the true sense of the word, wonderful.
Small comfort for the frostbitten.
Finally, a totally unrelated note. I have noticed that the Google Ads appearing in this blog seem to mistake my mention of Republicans and right wingers for support--and therefore, there seem no small number of ads for Palin's book or donation to the gubernatorial efforts of the Texan Kaye Bailey Hutchinson. No comment.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
What's up with the Capital One TV Commercials (NY Area)?
Maybe they customize them for different Metropolitan Statistical Areas, but in my area (NYC) the television ads for a bank called "Capital One" have taken several crazy twists, each one more annoying than the last. They have a separate and equally brazen (and disgusting) set of commercials for their credit cards, on which I shall also comment.
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
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