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Certainly the creative sorts at advertising agencies and marketing departments labor hard to contrive clever slogans. As a wordy fellow who can seldom compress any sentiment into catchphrase that will fit on a bumper sticker, I have great respect for their talents.
However, I have to wonder if they think these things
through. Consider the current US West campaign: Life's
better here.
Better than what? Better than death? Or better than life somewhere else? Are we just supposed to take their word for it, or will US West finance me for a year or two of research in Tahiti so that I can provide an objective report on whether life here is indeed better than life elsewhere?
The first commercial in the series featured John Elway out in the snow at an isolated farmstead, tossing footballs through an old tire suspended from a tree.
If he'd actually lived in that remote farmhouse, he
might have discovered certain US West life's better
here
features like mileage surcharges, party lines and
long waits for service upgrades or repairs, along with
indefinite postponements.
Or perhaps US West had abandoned that territory because it had sold off that exchange, as it has so many rural exchanges.
Anyway, it was a peculiar setting for that phone company
to be claiming that Life's better here.
If it is
indeed better, US West probably didn't have anything to do
with the improvement.
Often the next annoying ad comes from Denver's other
paper, which claims If you live here, you get
it.
Wait a minute, guys. Where I live, you can't get it, and that's true of about 90 percent of the area where this ad might be seen.
My here
is apparently an invalid here,
not
a real here,
and nobody consulted me about this.
Is somebody constructing a world of hierarchical
heres,
with some heres outranking others? Dare we
add placeism
to the other modern offenses of racism,
sexism, etc.?
Every time the McVeigh trial requires coverage, one
Denver station pops up a little graphic that says Terror
on Trial.
Really? Just about everybody I know is pretty much against terror. Indeed, it's almost impossible to find anyone who speaks favorably of terror. Nobody is putting terror on trial -- what would be the point? Terror is like murder or robbery -- everybody is against it.
So terror has not been on trial. The federal court in Denver has not been trying terror; it has been trying a suspected terrorist.
And if the prosecution is right, then Timothy McVeigh suffers from a common American delusion.
The prosecutors have explained that McVeigh, like millions of other Americans, was horrified by the federal assault on the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Most of us who were thus alarmed informed our congressional representatives, or penned critical newspaper columns, or wrote letters-to-the-editor, or called talk-radio stations. All this agitation apparently produced a beneficial result -- a patient FBI has since managed to restore order at the Montana Freeman compound and at the Republic of Texas without resorting to artillery.
But McVeigh, according to the prosecution, believed that if he blew up a building that housed annoying federal agencies like the FBI, the IRS and the ATF, then lots of people would see it as the first act of rebellion against an oppressive regime and they would immediately rise up to carry on the crusade.
Which, of course, didn't happen, and that's where McVeigh was suffering from an American delusion -- one that snares not only angry young men, but learned fellows who should know better.
For instance, consider the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The U.S. planners believed that if they could just put ashore a small force in Cuba, the great masses would spontaneously rise against Fidel Castro.
It didn't happen. Go even further back, to American Captain Zebulon Pike's trip to northern Mexico in 1807. His journal reflects that the population appeared quite oppressed by the Spanish colonial government, and would certainly rise in rebellion if the United States would just send in a small force to serve as a nucleus.
When that war arrived 40 years later, the U.S. sent thousands of soldiers into that territory -- and the population, contrary to Pike's prediction, did not rebel and join the American cause.
This peculiar delusion, that people are always seething for rebellion at any excuse, may have originated with Pike -- at least, I haven't find any earlier evidence of it.
Since then, it has produced tragedy, as at the Bay of Pigs and in Oklahoma City. Some things are worse than dumb marketing slogans.
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