Morons on parade in the always-egregious Sunday Week in Review. (I think that deserves to be its own department in my little blog.) Here's famous ad guy (and Hamptons roustabout) Jerry Della Femina, quoted by the frequently egregious Elisabeth Bumiller in her miserable thumbsucker about the power of negative advertising in American politics ("If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Run for President"):

"People want something emotional and dramatic," said Jerry Della Femina, the adman. "You can say, 'I'm a nice person' just so many times. After a while you turn and say, 'The other guy's a louse.' People would like to think that they are thoughtful and not swayed by negative advertising, but the fact is, they are. We're verbally aggressive. It's the American way. If it wasn't this way, we wouldn't have hockey."

Got that? Americans are verbally aggressive (well, maybe New Yorkers, buddy, but have you spent any time west of the Hudson?), which is why we "have" a physically violent Canadian sport. Yeah, I can't make that make sense either. The really astonishing thing is not somebody saying something this brain-dead (though you do wonder how Della Femina powered a big-time ad career if this represents the quality of his marketing insights), it's Bumiller quoting it in its own paragraph as if it were a big juicy hunk o' wisdom. [I've got more to say about Bumiller's piece, and I'll post on it separately in a bit.]

On the same page, Gregg Easterbrook is given space to hype his recent book and its sole, rather pathetic "big idea" ("All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite"), in an article pegged on last week's House legislation protecting the food industry from so-called "obesity lawsuits." [Easterbrook's intellectual style is characterized by Brian Doherty, reviewing The Progress Paradox (aka "Money can't buy happiness") in the WaPo, as making him sound "like the brightest sophomore in the quad."]

O.K., it's hard to be opposed to food. But the epidemic of obesity epitomizes the unsettled character of progress in affluent Western society. Our lives are characterized by too much of a good thing - too much to eat, to buy, to watch and to do, excess at every turn. Sometimes achievement itself engenders the excess: today's agriculture creates so much food at such low cost that who can resist that extra helping?

What a paradox, huh? Who'da thunk: Too much turns out to be a bad thing! But what's really stupid about this is the notion that appetite ("who can resist that extra helping?") is just somehow a natural consequence of production efficiency (itself just naturally an achievement: "so much food at such low cost"). The existence of a vast, multilayered enterprise that rationalizes food production by organizing and promoting consumption—the enormous apparatus of the social construction of appetite, in other words—seems to have escaped Easterbrook's notice. (Perhaps he missed this little book of a couple years back.) But then, if appetite isn't just something that happens in your gut, Easterbrook doesn't have his so-called paradox, does he?

Hmmm ... That reminds me, it's lunch time ...

Update: Robin at Fact-esque has her take on the Bumiller article already in place. Forgot to link to it earlier.

posted by michael  1:04:00 PM  
tell me about it []