Buy It, Just Don't Ask Why

In the old days, people advertised their business based on what it could do for the customer. A blacksmith advertised his shop based on the fact that he could do a blacksmith's work for people. This "marketing campaign" was usually limited to a sign above his door with an anvil on it, and the word-of-mouth testimonies of his customers.

There was dishonest advertising back then, of course; there always has been. A man in the marketplace might shout out that he had the best fish in the world, when in fact they were a three day-old catch that was getting a bit spoiled. Typically, though, the majority of advertising was limited, not very gaudy, and focused on the benefits of the product itself.

Modern advertising is wholly different. Like the picture at above left, which is a very mild example, our marketers make very little connection between the product at hand and the words and images that try to make people buy it. After all, what does "Coke adds life" mean? We can be sure it doesn't add a half-second to the life of anyone who drinks it, and whether it makes your life more interesting is entirely up to you.

There are two reasons, I think, for why advertising has come to this state. The first reason is the general demise of logic over the past few decades. The roots of this demise are deep, but most notably since the 1960s a great many people have come to value emotional and physical "highs" and mental bedazzlement over any deep, intrinsic meaning or logical cohesion. That's why big-budget movies with multiple explosions do better at the theatres than films that focus more on ideas and characters than high-speed chases. That is also one of the greatest reasons why advertisements can get away with having nothing at all to do with the product at hand. Let's take a beer commercial for another example. One of the slogans for Busch Beer is "Busch Beer. Head for the mountains." If anyone can find the intrinsic logical connection between the statement Busch Beer and the command "head for the mountains," I challenge him to show it to me. In all honesty, drinking beer has nothing to do with hitting the trail, and I highly doubt that many people who drink that brand ever do go to the mountains, or even take that injunction seriously. It just doesn't relate to Busch Beer in any sense. The chain of logic is broken at the most fundamental level, and few people seem to care, or even really notice.

The second reason is somewhat related. A host of the products produced today are not really that useful, and certainly not very necessary. Our blacksmithing friend was an essential member of his community, since he could make horseshoes, crowbars, knives, axes, and all kinds of other useful tools. Beer as a general commodity is not really necessary at all, and the world could easily say farewell to the Busch company without quivering to its foundations. Not that there's anything wrong with beer (taken in moderation). The problem arises when marketers feel that they must not allow the public to just choose for itself--in the which case Busch might just get shoved aside. The public has products waved in its face in a variety of clever ways, but because many of these products are just amenities, there is no real concrete logical principle to which their makers can appeal to attract public attention. What they have to do is select something they think will capture many people's attention, and then toss it in with the same pot as the product in the hopes that, while ogling at the Interesting Thing, the public catch sight of the product and, when browsing through the store, remember the product's picture and buy it instead of a competitor. And because of the logical disconnect problem in today's society, that isn't a big deal.

Neil Postman, a social commentator of great perception, compared advertisements in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death to myths. Advertisers don't create reasons for buying products; they create myths around them that make them look like answers to life's problems. This observation seems to be quite true. Here are a couple of the "myths" of advertising that I have observed. I'm sure there are many more, since I have watched no TV in my home for many years.

• Look at that babe!--Popular with shower products, men's cologne, beer, automobiles, and most everything else, this is the advertising ploy that using sensuality to catch the public eye. The camera will give us plenty of barely-restrained shots of a woman washing her hair in the shower, or a lady in a bikini on the beach, without really saying whether Dove soap actually keeps your hair cleaner or whether Coors Light has really been confirmed by popular opinion to have the best taste, or some freak health benefit, or what have you.
• A movie star's doing it, so I should too--Also popular with just about anything, this will have, say, Adrian Brody walking cheerfully down a road and infecting everyone with his energy...all due, we are supposed to believe, to Pepsi. Apparently the fact that he steps in front of a camera and speaks pre-written lines while dodging a gigantic ape (or pretending to stab Joaquin Phoenix) makes him a leading authority on soft drinks.
• Vicarious coolness--Popular with cars, beer, camping gear, and much more, this is usually marketed to male teenagers and young men, and usually features, say, Mazda cars being driven in a flashy and noisy manner through desert landscapes or some urban bridge, or a muscular man in a nightclub with some adoring girlfriend holding one hand, and a Budweiser in the other. In this way the young men get a vicarious thrill from fast car-races or a successful date without having to take the trouble to seek one or the other, and associate the same "coolness" with the product at hand. That way, even though one may never have the skill to spin out his Mazda in the Alpine snows and come out not only unscratched, but with no snow on the tires, he still associates owning a Mazda with being respected.
• Haha! That was funny, I guess I'll go buy something--Perhaps advertising's biggest trump card along with pretty women, this acts on the assumption that eliciting a laugh from the customer will make the featured product memorable, and so encourage him to buy it. That is why Budweiser had a commercial during (I think) the Olympic games. It ran something like this. A man sits on a couch with a blond-haired girl kissing him (and, I think, with a beer on the table by him). The girl excuses herself, probably to go to the restroom or something, and the man calls his friend. Asked what the girl is like, he says something to the effect of, "she's pretty weird, but I'm desperate." The girl returns, and her pet parrot suddenly starts squawking, "she's pretty weird, but I'm desperate," over and over again. The last shot is the man getting kicked out of her house, and then the camera shows a bottle of beer with the Budweiser name. This doesn't even try to say, "getting this product will put you in the way of pretty women" or "buying this will make you cool." All it does is set up a situation of domestic strife that some people, I suppose, find amusing. I am actually not certain whether the marketers care that the customer even remembers the gag--only that the image of the beer stays in his mind so Budweiser makes more money.

It would be quite possible to go on with these examples, but the point has, I think, been made. Advertisements are a multi-billion dollar industry of logical disconnects, feel-good stories that build of a false mythos around products that, in the main, don't mean much at all. They are strong-arm tactics to try to make gullible people buy things they do not need and, unless prodded, would probably never even think to buy. Only a society like those of our modern age that are so full of extra cash, unprecedented leisure time, and populations filled with softies out for a good time at any price (except strenuous exertion) could produce such an industry.

As long as it continues to turn a profit, this industry won't go away. But we can contribute to its demise by not giving in to its ploys. After buying necessities, choose your amenities wisely and with any eye to God's glory and your pocket book. Drink the beer you like the taste of most, not the one Lindsay Lohan drinks on TV. Buy the car that gets you where you want to go, not the one that couple drove at 115 through the Arizona wilderness.

Let us try to infuse a little logic into our consumerist society.

~Connor

Abortion: The Ugly Face of Solipsism

For years, "pro-life" and "pro-choice" advocates have been accusing each other of being in the wrong on the abortion issue. Pro-lifers say abortion advocates are legalizing murder. Pro-choicers say abortion detractors are attempting to restrict a woman's fundamental "right to choose," a.k.a. her "reproductive rights," or "right to prevent the birth of her child by violent means." For those of you who like plain English, her license to kill. It is probably quite clear from those words that I firmly believe the assessment of the pro-lifers is correct, and the presence of abortion one of the most devilish monstrosities ever to slip into American society wearing a "society-accepted" stamp.

However, I do not intend to retrace here the arguments made that abortion is simply one form--and a particularly heinous form since it cuts off little humans almost at the very starting-place of their lives--of murder. Anyone can at least agree that abortion prevents the birth of a very live human being, a being that according to pro-abortion advocates somehow miraculously comes alive the moment it passes completely out of the birth canal (and is apparently not sufficiently alive to qualify as human until it's all the way out--sticking a needle through its skull and injecting it with poison as it is still coming out is apparently fine and dandy according to those who advocate partial-birth abortion).

What I do intend to do is talk a little about what kind of attitude one needs to have to support such a practice. One needs an attitude that is so crushingly selfish as to almost qualify as solipsism. These advocates of abortion, primarily feminist activists (see my previous post), but also a good deal of others, are so obsessed with the idea of sex without consequences that nothing, in their view, can or should stand in its way. But, of course, the issues runs deeper than sex--it really centers on self-determination, pleasure, and the Cult of Me.

The central tenet of selfishness is this: I am more important than everyone else simply because I happen to be me. That is, I want to enjoy everything there is to enjoy in life, and since I cannot vicariously enjoy it through the enjoyment of others, I want it for myself. Selfishness of the Cult of Me, where the particular individual matters most. Selfishness is a religion where the individual is God. Sinful man is always striving toward this goal in some way, and even Christians still have to contend, perhaps more than with any other particular sin, with selfishness and its Siamese twin, pride. After all, a person who wants everything for himself must think he is the most important person on the planet, consciously or unconsciously, and that, if you ask me, is rather prideful.

In short, and to put things in plainer light, selfishness is the core of rebellion against God. We are created to serve God, and the human rebellion is to serve ourselves, to be our own masters.

To bring things back to the topic at hand, selfishness is a powerful force in modern American society. Teenage culture is rank with it. Consumerism in many cases depends on it. And it has wreaked havoc with our marriages and our birth-rates. Pro-abortion logic states that sex is pleasurable. They use this as license for promiscuity, their first turn from the teaching of the Bible, and a big cave in to selfishness. (After all, if it pleases the individual, why wait until marriage? Maybe you the individual don't want to be tied down to one person your whole life.) With this kind of promiscuity comes the inevitable consequences one gets when violating the laws of God: disease, though not the subject under consideration, is one; more to the point is frequent and often teenage pregnancy. Teenagers, at least the kind we have around today, are too young to care for children, and most welfare mothers and posh yuppie women are "too busy" for more than, say, two kids. Either Uncle Sam hasn't given them enough money, or they just want to "live their own life" and not be "bothered" by children.

For the most part, in the majority of societies, mothers either put up with these unwanted children or, in an age where an illicit pregnancy actually brought social ostracization, simply abandoned, which is bad enough. In the 19th, and increasingly in the 20th century, our obliging scientific minds came up with relatively reliable methods of birth control. This, at least, just prevents conception; it doesn't kill anything. Whether it is acceptable for the Christian or not I am not absolutely sure, and not having studied the issue much, and being unmarried, it is probably not a province in which I can speak with much confidence.

But, birth control doesn't always work. That's a problem for our solipsists. Here they've been having so much fun, and then a child comes along. A child means responsibility, sacrificial love, time, patience, perhaps a few amenities given up to feed the extra mouth: all things many (though, in all fairness, fortunately by no means all) of our solipsists recoil from like death. In fact, they recoil from it in such horror that they are willing to kill to keep their precious status quo. And they are willing to scream, browbeat, lobby, protest, and cover all their actions under such dubious and opaque terms as "reproductive rights," "the right to choose," "the right of a woman over her body," and such like--all to keep the butcher's bill rising higher and higher.

I don't know about you, but I find it pretty darn interesting that activists in America spit in rage at George W. Bush for "killing" 3,387 soldiers in Iraq since 2003, when they and those like them have been responsible for the murder of about 1,287,000 babies in 2003 alone.

I think that was the first time I really made myself angry over the process of writing a post. I may have even lost track of my ultimate point. And I am angry, full of wrath that so many smiling, adorable little babies like the one in the picture above have been snuffed out, not only before they had a chance to live out their lives, but before they even had a chance to see the light of day. America is guilty of more murders than Hitler ever committed. May God have mercy on her.

~Connor

Feminists: Some Real Problems, a Fecundity of Unrealistic Solutions

I was reading in one of my textbooks today, Western Civilization by Jackson J. Spielvogel, about the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s-1990s, and an interesting thought struck me. It was occasioned, I think, mainly by this passage: "Women got together to share their personal experiences and become aware of the many ways that male dominance affected their lives. This consciousness-raising helped many women become activists" (853).

One question that can be immediately raised, of course, is how pervasive and marked a problem this can be if groups had to be started in order to convince women just how repressed they were, or are. Nevertheless, that was not the subject of my thought.

What I did think was how curious the goals of the feminist movement are. They identified some real abuses, past and present, of the Biblical notion of male headship (which they would also vehemently deny, but they will have to argue that point with God if they get the chance). Yet their reaction, in the midst of this discovery, seems odd. To me, it appears evident that the best solution to any problems in the familial and societal structures would be an attempt to achieve some level of cooperation between male and female. The feminist is not going to look to the real answer to this, the Bible, but even so, any sensible person should notice that men and women are built, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to match and augment one another. This holds true in spite of all tantrums, arguments, break-ups, and the like.

And yet, what the feminists seem to be doing, in this passage and today, is fighting for a complete separation and autonomy between the sexes. Take another passage, for instance. "Women sought and gained a measure of control over their own bodies by insisting that they had a right to both contraception and abortion" (Spielvogel, 853). Although it is undoubtedly the woman who carries the child, this hardly seems to take into consideration the flip-side of the matter. A man's body is also necessary for children, and the children are as much his own as the mother's. It is probably true that in olden times (and in many cultures today, most notably Islamic and African ones) that men could demand to sleep with their wives whenever they wanted, and simultaneously refuse any kind of contraception, thus, in a sense, forcing the woman to bear more children than the family could realistically care for. There are multiple problems with such an attitude, and the blame in that case would be entirely on the man.

Yet here again feminism has jumped over to quite the opposite side of the issue, in which the woman is the sole arbiter of her sex life, number of children, etc. The man is a kind of unwanted guest, tolerated because he is necessary, and perhaps the more disliked because he is. If anything, this seems to be denying the man any control over his body (quite aside from the issue of the baby's body, which I may raise in another post later) as much as any previous state of affairs denied the woman that control. Again, there are many other issues that could be raised here, and which I probably will raise when I think them through, including the selfishness that seems to be inherent in thinking first of "controlling one's own body" in a marital relationship, as if one of the deepest things about that relationship is not giving oneself selflessly to one's spouse. But my main point here is that, in most respects, feminism seems to emphasize, not any kind of mutual solution to the problems they perceive, nor even, really, any association with men on any level but the most necessary. They do not seem to want to be respected by men, honored by men, or even loved by men: they want to be men. And that kind of autonomous, separate, independent attitude can only be dangerous for human beings no more designed to be men than men are to be women.

~Connor