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]

Download your worries

Driving down a country road this morning, on our way to a local park for a walk in the woods, my wife and I (and Siegfried) passed a church (Baptist, probably) with one of those large, ubiquitous glass-enclosed sign boxes identifying the church and the pastor and displaying a pithy saying intended to woo converts, if not make you feel guilty for forsaking religion (or both, I guess). The saying in this box was more "with it" than most:

Download your troubles
Go online with God

    My wife and I discussed the metaphor and couldn't decide whether the pastor (or his publicist) was only semi-computer literate or had a new brand of theology. I mean, why would you want to download worries onto yourself from "up there" (on the Internet)? Wouldn't you upload them, give them up to God (in prayer, supposedly)? Or does the saying mean to suggest that by "going online with God," you ascend to Him somehow, so that in downloading your worries you'd be sending them back down (or leaving them down) there where you no longer have to deal with them?
    Fortunately, it doesn't make any difference.

The pithy saying in the graphic I found on the Internet is more interesting. It addresses a serious, real problem in the world today, in America especially because of the way the First Amendment is usually characterized, as guaranteeing "freedom of religion." The actual text of the amendment is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

While outlawing laws "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" does seem to guarantee freedom of religion, outlawing "establishment of religion" equally seems to guarantee freedom from religion. It would certainly be strange otherwise, given that some of our leading founding fathers were hardly religious.
    On Earth today, freedom from is in more need of protection than freedom of, what with false advertising like that being downloadable from the Internet. If atheists are currently more active than they have been, I'd say it's because they feel they need to push back. The harder, the more they buy Sam Harris's warning that religion is a menace:

In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence. Even now, many of us are motivated not by what we know but by what we are content to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion, and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come. These and other degradations await us along the well-worn path of piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life, they have only one terminus in this one—a future of ignorance and slaughter. [p. 223, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004]