I’m being targeted

Pro & con

By Jim Rix

I recently viewed an episode of Adam Ruins Everything (truTV)^* in which comedian Adam Conover exposes internet services like Facebook and Google for eavesdropping on your e-mail and activity and then providing your profile to prospective advertisers.

Corporate personhood

Someone on Facebook objected Tuesday to my assertion there (in connection with Friday's post, "Calling all voters") that "donating money for election campaigns is unnecessary; most American voters can read and have the ability to obtain reliable information about the candidates and the issues. They don't need to watch or read political advertisements."
    I was later grateful that, in objecting, Mr. Tom Lowe directed my attention to the Frank Rich article in the June 16 issue of New York Magazine ("Nuke 'Em: Why negative advertisements are powerful, essential, and sometimes (see “Daisy”) even artistic"), for I based yesterday's post about political attack ads on it.
    But the first part of Tom's comment was:

Problem with that stance is—according to the recent studies I've seen—most people get their information from TV these days. So acting on this reasonable principle means ceding the advantage to Fox News and the Koch brothers.

    To which I at the time flippantly replied:

Technically, [the post's] second suggestion ("Ignore the campaigns, don't watch advertising") covers this, seeing as how Fox News is essentially political advertising.

    Then yesterday I saw Jeremy W. Peters's article, "Enemies and Allies for ‘Friends’, in The New York Times, critical for the usual reasons of Fox News and, in particular, of its show "Fox & Friends":

"You can huff and puff about how outrageous [Fox News] is," Mr. Weiner [the former New York congressman who was one of the few members of his party regularly to accept Fox News invitations] said. "But they have millions and millions of people watching them. And you have to proceed under the assumption that at least some of those people are persuadable."
    Despite all the outrageousness there is a keen self-awareness inside the network about "Fox & Friends." "We reflect who the audience is," said Mr. Shine, offering a recent example. "We didn’t spend a lot of time discussing who won the Tony Awards."
    He added, "Our audience knows us, and we know them."

Incestuous clan that, Fox News and its audience.

I took advantage of Mr. Peters's publishing immediately on the heels of my remark about Fox News's being "political advertising" to bolster my flippant reply by posting a link to his article on Facebook, commenting that,

As I said to Tom Lowe recently in a comment on Facebook, Fox News is essentially political advertising, watched by folks who don't (and apparently can't) think for themselves and want (and possibly need) to be told what to believe (so long as it suits their existing prejudices).

    Flippant indeed. Why single out Fox News?
    Joe Story, a political observer in Kansas City, Missouri, pointed out that

The same could be said about MSNBC. Fox News is not the only channel in the political advertising, brain washing business. I don't watch either show.

    And the reliably well-informed Mr. Lowe, who is a close student of history and an astute social commentator out in Berkeley, California (the city of my birth), made a more general point, one particularly pointed in the context of attack ads designed to nuke Mitt Romney:

Just as ABC was known in the Reagan era as the "Administration Broadcasting Company," CBS provided press credentials to CIA operatives in the 1950s and 60s, and NBC ran pro nuclear energy stories on their news shows when owned by General Electric. No clean hands to be found anywhere when corporate interests are involved. [emphasis mine]

Whose context?
    Right.
    His who said: "Corporations are people."

Mission not impossible

Images from
LBJ's "Daisy"
ad attacking
Goldwater

Your assignment: Describe an attack ad that the Democrats could use to "nuke" the Republicans in the coming political election.

In his current column in New York Magazine, "Nuke 'Em: Why negative advertisements are powerful, essential, and sometimes (see “Daisy”) even artistic," June 16, Frank Rich describes Chrysler's halftime ad for Super Bowl 2012 as arguably "the best political ad of 2012 so far."

...Narrated by Clint Eastwood, [it] was so arresting, and, intentionally or not, so supportive of the auto-industry bailout, that [Karl] Rove hailed it as an "extremely well-done ad" even as he said he was "offended" by its seeming Obama partisanship.

    Rich fails to point out that Eastwood's final line could be the anthem for Obama's re-election campaign: "Yeah, it's halftime, America, and our second half is about to begin."
    President Obama's first half taught him one of the lessons that America had been depending on him to learn: Trying to work with ideologically rigid Republicans in a bipartisan spirit doesn't work. In his second half, which begins with winning re-election, the President must hit the Republicans hard and drive them back to their own goal line.
    I predict that he will take effective steps to do just that, and the momentum he establishes by winning re-election will result in his achieving some more of the things in his second term that we'd hoped to see in his first.

Moristotle readers can help. You may already have thought of an idea that could be developed into a highly effective attack ad.
    If not, I suggest that you go read "Nuke 'Em." Rich provides links to about ten political ads that you can watch for stimulation, including the "Daisy" ad referred to in his column's subtitle, which the Johnson administration used devastatingly against Senator Barry Goldwater, who lost to Johnson in a landslide.

The Johnson team had a number of promising lines of attack to work with in going after Goldwater: his opposition to civil-rights legislation, his desire to make Social Security "voluntary," his fellow-traveling with John Birchers and other loons of the far right. But the campaign settled on Goldwater’s sloppy bluster about nuclear weapons because the prospect of an atomic Armageddon transcended ideological or policy differences and cut to the emotional quick of the electorate's existential fears.
    The content dictated the bold form. Goldwater’s propensity for flip rhetorical bellicosity was so well known that any replay of his actual words in the ad would be a gratuitous distraction and could be dispensed with. Better still, from the Democrats' point of view, it was Goldwater's own vanquished GOP rivals for the nomination—Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton—who had led the way in publicizing his loose talk and portraying him as a risky warmonger. (The then-governor of Michigan, George Romney, was another helpful Goldwater basher.) The Republicans had done such a good job of advance hatchet work that voters taking in David and Bathsheba [the movie on TV during which the ad was aired] could let their own imaginations run wild while filling in the ad's blanks. As any student of horror movies knows, what isn't seen or stated is far scarier than any literal enactment onscreen. It's hard for a Hitchcock fan to look at "Daisy" and not see it as a cinematic stepchild of Psycho (1960), in which the brutal shower scene is all the more terrifying because the audience never actually sees the knife violate Janet Leigh's body.

Study Rich's paragraph that describes Mitt Romney’s résumé as "a preposterously target-rich environment for attack ads."

...his lackluster record as Massachusetts governor...his career at Bain...Potentially abortion [would] be criminalized [if Romney were elected]. Women [would] be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.
    ...There’s also the flip-flopping Mr. Etch A Sketch...countless tone-deaf attempts to feel the pain of the 99 percent...his effort to deny that his Massachusetts health-care law was the precursor of Obama’s Affordable Care Act...his truculence in foreign policy...[his] "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt"...the money stashed in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland...his endorsement of the Paul Ryan budget, which would mutilate the social safety net, including benefits for seniors...his endorsement of Arizona immigration policy as a national "model"...his call for illegal immigrants to submit to "self-deportation"...the radical party he is attempting to mask with a moderate image....

When you've finished shaping your best idea for an attack ad against Romney and the Republicans, submit it to Moristotle for publication. Moristotle's readers will vote to determine the best attack ad idea submitted, and Moristotle will send the winning idea on to the Obama re-election campaign for consideration.
    Multiple submissions are allowed. If you submit two or more winning ideas, you might have a future in political attack advertising!

Punish him...or reward them?

One reader of "Calling all voters" told me that she agrees completely about not donating any money for election campaigns. "It is absolutely unnecessary." Most American voters can read and have the ability to obtain reliable information about the candidates and the issues. They don't need to watch or read political advertisements.
    But my friend doesn't agree about what to do on Election Day. (I had written, "Follow Nike's advice and just go out and vote.")
    After losing the elections of 2000 and 2004 (my friend voted for Gore and Kerry), she was made hopeful in 2008 by "Obama's great plans and ideas."
    But midway through 2012 she is bitterly disappointed. "Obama has not delivered anything he promised." She says that she is "not going to waste my time to vote this year."
    Bitter disappointment is a poignant, personal reason not to vote, and my friend is not the only one who could use that excuse for shunning the poles in November.

But not voting for that reason is equivalent to punishing President Obama without taking the Republican party's deliberate roadblocking into consideration.
    The Republicans' oft-expressed Number One Goal has been (and continues to be) to put Obama down and make sure he can't be re-elected. If my friend doesn't vote, she will be rewarding Congressional Republicans more than she will be punishing President Obama.
    But I have faith in my friend. I'm sure that she'll see the illogic of her intention not to vote and will show up at the polls on Tuesday, November 6, hoping to give the President another chance (and the Republicans fewer members of congress). And helping to give the nation another chance.
    I hope that everyone else suffering disappointment over our government's frustrating stalemate (and I'm one of them) will not reward the obstructionist party in November by refusing to vote for anybody at all.
    To do that would not be the first step in taking our country back.

When you go fishing...

Carl Jung (1875-1961), who
made much of synchronicity
(roughly, spiritually
meaningful coincidence)

On Monday, in my Mad Men post, something prompted me to suggest that the episode (in particular, Ginsberg's jingle)'s theme might be that one of advertising's missions is to persuade us to accept the delusion that we can "truly own" anything we can afford to buy (like a Jaguar automobile).
    And Ken fairly commented, "OK, I'll bite. Why can't I truly own something I've bought? I don't own the computer I'm using?"
    And I replied, "The truth is that my statement expressed a vague intuition I was having at the time, and I can't replicate it at the moment. If it returns, along with some words to express it better, you'll be among the first I'll tell them to."
    In other words, my intuition had told me that there was something illusory (or delusional) about the idea that we could "truly own something"—or "anything we can afford to buy."

"Father and Daughter" was written
for the children's animated film
The Wild Thornberrys Movie

So it was striking today that while watching Paul Simon and Friends (via Netflix download), the 2007 ceremony of performances at the Library of Congress honoring Mr. Simon for the first-ever Gershwin Prize for Popular Music, I heard the following lyrics from "Father and Daughter" (2002):

Trust your intuition
Its just like going fishing
You cast your line
And hope you get a bite [emphasis mine]

    Well, in my case it seems to have proven to be like going fishing, but I'm not sure what, if anything, I was hoping to catch. I'm certain I wasn't hoping to catch a question I couldn't answer. (Ken has asked me a few of those.)

Maybe something of what I "intuited" is suggested by Simon's next four lines:

But you don't need to waste your time
Worrying about the market place
Try to help the human race
Struggling to survive its harshest night

The words even refer to the terrain where advertising reigns, the market place. Simon (the father reassuring and counseling his daughter) suggests that worrying about it—focusing on what we can buy and sell—shouldn't be our highest value. It isn't going to help us survive our harshest night.
     If we think it is, we're deluding ourselves?

Ken, I know that's more like a poem (or a sketch for one) than an answer to your question.
    Now I need to go back and work on the last paragraph of Monday's Mad Men post.
_______________

At last

In the latest episosde of Mad Men, Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman) puts out the line that gets the Jaguar account for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce (& Harris, who puts out something else needed): "Jaguar. At last. Something beautiful you can truly own."

Mad Men: The Other Woman (2012: Phil Abraham) Season 5/Episode 11: Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) & Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) make career moves.

At last. An opportunity for Joan—
A partnership at 5 percent her own.
    But Peggy says she's finished, through, 
    And does the only thing to do—
"Good-bye, Don." He kisses her hand. She's gone.

This episode (Ginsberg's jingle) could be a symbol for one of advertising's missions: To persuade us to accept the delusion that we can "truly own" anything we can afford to buy. [Follow-up]

Geez! What gives?

When I revised yesterday's post slightly just now, and Blogger confirmed the action, I was startled to see displayed to the right by Google the concentrated advertising:

• The Shepherd Project
  Cutting edge Christian speakers,
  including Craig A. Smith
  www.shepherdproject.com
• Meet Christian Singles
  Find Your Christian Soul Mate Here.
  Join Now For Free & Find Your Love!
  ChristianMingle.com
• God Loves You
  Here is a Prayer That Can Change Your Life
  www.Jesus2020.com
• † Play Jesus Songs Now †
  † Learn to Play All Your Favorite †
  † Jesus Songs in Record Time †
  www.gospelguitarcourse.com

Is this just an artifact of Google's sophisticated (if mis-) direction of advertising, or are Jesus and God pursuing me (like hounds of heaven perhaps)?

Dawkins on tipping points

Having recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, as well as currently discussing with my friend Jim Rix ways to nudge sales of his book Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out to a tipping point (and even having watched an episode of the TV program "Mad Men" last night—about Madison Avenue advertising in the 'sixties), I was fascinated this morning to come across the following passage in Richard Dawkins's book, The Blind Watchmaker (about how Darwinian evolution can produce complex organisms like the human brain):

It appears to be a fact that many people will buy a record for no better reason than that a large number of other people are buying the same record, or are likely to do so....
    To a lesser extent, the same phenomenon of popularity being popular for its own sake is well known in the worlds of book publishing, women's fashions, and advertising generally. One of the best things an advertiser can say about a product is that it is the best-selling product of its kind. Best-seller lists are published weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue of that fact. Publishers speak of a book "taking off," and those publishers with some knowledge of science even speak of a "critical mass for take-off." The analogy here is to an atomic bomb...When a book's sales "go critical," the numbers reach the point where word-of-mouth recommendations et cetera cause its sales suddenly to take off in a runaway fashion. Rates of sales suddenly become dramatically larger than they were before critical mass was reached, and there may be a period of exponential growth before the inevitable levelling out and subsequent decline. [from Chapter 8, "Explosions and Spirals," pp. 219-220]