caveman, meta-redux.

Whenever I'm confused about the direction our culture is going, I start to pay attention to television commercials again.



So, leave it to the hard-sell boys on Mad Ave to deep-focus my attention span. The whole Geico carpet-bombing campaign that by now has seemed to be inundating us for decades - i'nn'it? - is a fantastic product pitch. What's sold is the convenience of "switching." Forget about safety or peace of mind. A legally required nuisance is turned into an independent consumer's choice. This non-issue, of course, needs its appropriate fictional crisis in order to mask the fact that the choice is fictitious to begin with. (Oh, T-Dub Adorno, stop turning!) Enter the caveman and his indignant reptilian criticism. The clip up there is the perfect encapsulation of contemporary marketing strategies and shows how meta is not the new paradigm.


UPDATE:
The beauty that is this commercial derives from the fact that the scenario only works if you are already willingly predisposed to understand the reference to our indignant caveman in transit (muzak feat. Eliott Lipp). Haunted by the ignorant slights against his position, cavedude attempts to remove himself from the controversy by going on a leisurely vacation, whereupon he is confronted by his own stereotype and painfully realizes the limitations of identity politics once more. This recognizable frustration is what the commercial emphasizes in order to offer a sentiment of safety: I see what's happening as well, but I am not helpless. There is a number I can call without extreme prejudice. Thank Geico for God and the way things are.

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if it was packaged wisdom.

A few tidbits were frightening and edifying at the same time last week. The Wall Street Journal reported on the growing problem of rampant plagiarism by pastors. Across denominations, sermons are retrieved and recycled online to be fed to unsuspecting parishioners. Quoth one unrepentant pastor: "We need to get over the idea that we have to be completely original with our message." As long as you stay on-message. While the full-length Borat movie was uploaded in ten-minute increments on the "Goog-Tube," only to be taken down post-haste, the Chinese Wikipedia became mysteriously accessible again and logged in a record 1200 new-user registrations per day. The genocide in Darfur has its own MySpace page now, but the "I am African" campaign hit a snag with the appearance of Gwynneth "Mbgwuini" Paltrow. In related colonialist news, it will please you, no doubt, though, to find that the first edition of Ian Fleming's 1957 From Russia with Love is being offered at $ 4,500.-, which is a cool two grand more than a first-edition copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged from the same year. All this while Kramer went nuts.

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critical mass.

I do not exempt myself from our period of relentless pragmatism and a collective urge towards stupidity enabled by a permanent state of partial attention, but it will become necessary to think about the masses again.

Or, to paraphrase the brilliant CitiPremierPass credit card commercials currently broadcast on terrestrial and cable television, "revolting - very, very, very revolting."

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literary landscape.

Q: "How do you see America's contemporary literary landscape?" A: "We have some good writers around, I think -- but where are the readers? America's problem has never been lack of talent, but lack of audience."

Gore Vidal in a Time Out New York interview.

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over and over again.

In keeping with its tradition of disdainful middle-brow ressentiment against academic thinking, the New York Times has enlisted a (Stanley) Fish bowl view for its blogs features that intends to challenge “preconceived ideas about politics, education and society” entitled Think Again. While I welcome any rhetorical flourishes of this insouciant idiomatic expression, I deplore its programmatic implication, as if repetition could make a difference. Conversely, are we really back to thinking again? Mostly, though, these "challenges" amount to aggressively middle-of-the-road assertions of common sense. A useful corrective to the unconditional celebration of the wisdom of crowds in this respect can be found in an article exploring Digital Maoism, with the Times already reporting on 'net mobs in China.

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