(no subject)

The stereotypes say that it's only the crotchety old retirees who sit at home at 9:00am on a weekday morning and shout at the paper, but when I find myself doing that, I don't feel old and crotchety. I feel young and idealistic and somehow naive, because I know that these things that seem so self-evident they have me yelling at a piece of newsprint cannot possibly be this obvious. Yet I can't see the other side of the issue because the obvious side is blinding me. There is some famous quotation from Mark Twain, the gist of which is that when he was young (14, 15, or "a boy," according to various versions on the internet), he thought his father was an idiot, but when he returned home later (7 years later, at the age of 21 is the most common version, but there's also 10 years later at the age of 25, and even a 30 years later floating around as well) he was amazed at how much the old man had learned. I feel like I'm ready to discover what the old men have learned, but I'm well past 21 and I'm still waiting.

( Don't click if you want pictures of fuzzy animals; I personally find political diatribes tiresome, especially on livejournal, which seems much better suited to fan fiction and bad grammar. )

*You should know that I really don't do well with children. They come into my shop, shriek, smear up my nice clean glass cases, and make noise everywhere they go. Aside from the kids I am personally related to or who belong to my parents friends and managed to behave when I met them, there are really only two kids that I like: Mimi Smartypants's Nora, who I know only from nice quiet text on a screen, and the little girl Boo from Monsters, Inc., who is not even real. Cute, though. Daniel and I watched the movie last night. This does not mean, however, that I want them to suffocate from asthma or die from infections they could easily have been immunized against. I am aware that they become perfectly reasonable, intelligent human beings capable of carrying on a civilized conversation sometime around the age of ten, and I'm willing to put up with them until then.

**Ever since I had to write industry briefs on advertising and marketing, I've been fascinated with them. Often commercials bug me, but in a fun way. I am rather crotchety at heart (if not in a retiree under an afghan sense (although that does sound awfully comfy)), and I enjoy pointing out the foibles of bad advertising. For example, the ubiquitous framework: "Do you have trouble with X, Y, or Z? (no.) Hi! I'm Joe Schmo, and I'm here to talk to you about how you can fix X, Y, or Z with just six easy payments of $800." Why do they ("they" being advertisers) think that the "hi, I'm Joe Schmo" is going to pull in people? Is it related to the human element? Is it a similar strategy to having the two fake personalities have a fake conversation wherein one tells the other how her life has been changed by produce Q? Because it's not convincing, although it does make me laugh at the stupidity of the approach.

One advertising gimmick that makes me cranky in a less enjoyable way is the emphasis on "natural." Not "organic," which actually means something and has a department to enforce standards (even if it is understaffed and ineffective, as I read recently in a NYT article that now proves untraceable), but "natural," which means exactly nothing, because people don't genuinely want everything to be "natural." "Natural" in "natural childbirth" means an appallingly high death rate after an appallingly painful experience. "Natural" in "natural medicine" means eating a lot of herbs that are not regulated because homeopathy is not a licensed medical field, but because the herbs can do actual things to your body, you can poison yourself and have no one to sue when you go blind because you took a tincture of parsley in wood alcohol for the sniffles (oooh, doesn't it sound natural? "Tincture" is a great word, and parsley, gathered fresh*** from the woods sounds so refreshing). A human's "natural" lifespan without antibiotics is something like thirty years or less. Yes, you die young, but at least your corpse yields organic steak for the wolves.

***Oh, don't even get me started on "fresh." Look, people, you come into my store, eat my samples, rave about how good they taste, and then ask me if my cakes are fresh. Did it taste good? Then what do you care how fresh it is? If you want a "fresh" cake, I'll give you something still hot from the oven. Oh, the mousse won't have set, so it will slop all over, and the buttercream won't stick, because the cake is too hot, but this gooey mess will be fresh, just for you!

This is all an issue of how things sound. Meaning and practicality mean nothing in public relations, only soundbites, and people are so touchy about it all. Two newspaper articles caught my eye. They are not really related to fresh, natural, organic selling, but neither is advertising really related to politics, so lets not worry about continuity. Article the first I read yesterday, about a ferry in Washington that had let the FBI know about two men who had been asking suspicious questions about structural details and off-limits areas of the boat. The FBI then released a picture taken by a crewmember of the men, and suddenly Muslim groups and Arab American coalitions are crying foul because the men appear to be Middle Eastern. "It's racial profiling," they cry. Get a grip, people! These men acted suspiciously, so a picture of them was released so the FBI could investigate. The fact that they are Middle Eastern is incidental! No one would cry foul if they were white and the circumstances were the same. Then it would be "please report to the police if you see these people," and everyone would applaud the crewmember for having the foresight to take a picture so the FBI could resolve the reports. This is the same nonsense that Daniel ran into in school when the police came into classrooms to take into custody suspects who were presumed armed and wanted in connection with a pistol-whipping attack. The policemen were white, the suspect students were black, and a teacher was upset because this was an "image problem." Because what you really want to do is waste time finding a black policeman while a kid with a gun who is suspected of having attacked somebody the day before moves about freely in a school. Because there's an image problem.

Article the second involves sikhs who are upset about being asked to take off their turbans during airport screenings, while Jews are allowed to keep yarmulkas. This means a specific community is targeted, claims the managing director of United Sikhs. People wearing straw hats also have to take them off, which means cowboys are also targeted, I guess. I am sympathetic to the claim that removing your turban is an intensely private thing to do, and being denied space or privacy to retie it is insensitive. However, it is not unfair racial profiling. A genuine turban might be wound so tightly that nothing could fit inside, but that doesn't mean someone can hide something inside a fake turban and try to pass for real. This is the same sort of reasoning as, "I'm offended you think I'd steal a credit card! Why must you check my ID?" Whether or not you are for real is secondary to the fact that somebody who is not for real can look the same. You can't hide a gun under a yarmulkah. Lighten up.