CNN reports that Art Buchwald has died. Why this is in the entertainment section I don’t know for he was in many ways a much a journalist as Cronkite or Murrow.
Buchwald approached politics with the humorous derision it deserves and helped me, at least, not take it all so seriously.
A quiet nod for a decent man of perspective.
I don’t register on Hugh’s radar. I’ve never commented on his blog which I read with varying degrees of regularity in much the same way I imagine fundamentalist bible thumpers look at Playboy: they’re sort of revolted and compelled at the same time.
Hugh works in marketing. He is a marketing guy. He also thinks pretty hard about how marketing, branding, and the internet intersect and he writes about them regularly at Gapingvoid.com. These are all topics in which I have some interest but my view of Hugh’s blog matches that of the fundamentalist bible thumper’s in that I believe marketing to be one of the primary sources of evil in modern culture.
Put simply: Marketing exists to tell you that you’re deficient and point out the ways in which Company A’s product can help you make up for that heretofore unknown deficiency in ways that are so much more productive, efficient, and have a higher probability of getting you laid – because creating the illusion that a product will increase your probability of getting laid is really what marketing is all about – than Company B’s product. Given that religion already existed to tell us we were deficient on an eternal damnation sort of scale way before anyone thought of marketing did we really need another juggernaut force beating us down? I don’t think so.
Still, marketing is tangentially part of my professional life so I need to pay attention to what the people who get paid to think about marketing think about marketing so I can steal their best ideas and pass them off as my own.
Hugh also does a wee bit of drawing. His cartoons always strike me in the most visceral ways. Unlike marketing they lack prevarication and, more often than not, cut directly to the center of a particular situation or emotional state. This is the sort of mood I was in today.
Let’s just say that I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
Having already played Ms. Language person on the subject of less vs. fewer and correct usage I’ve been paying more attention lately to how these common comparatives are used.
There was an example of misuse so heinous on the evening news the other night that I’ve completely repressed the context. It was Fox so a little leeway can be given for the generalized idiocy in any case. But then came this morning.
I had occasion to be at a Starbucks this morning and I found need for a napkin. Printed on the light tan paper was a very admirable bit of marketing: made of 100% post-consumer recycled fiber. Then came the knife: Less napkins. Less Waste. Less napkins. Less waste.
I nearly screamed. I know now just how Lynn Truss felt when she stepped out of Victoria Station and saw the advertisement for Two Weeks [sic] Notice.
I give written language another 15 years before we’re back to the pre-Chaucer days.
Five years ago, back when I was working for The Treehuggers, people who study these things told me that we were already 25 years too late to stop global warming; the damage we’d done to the planet was too vast and the only thing we could do was not do more.
Whether what is going on is attributable to global warming or not is a matter for debate but as I type this it is 70degF on January 6th at 40deg N latitutde, and yes, I’m inordinately pleased by this. NOAA has been widely quoted as saying that a strong warm weather pattern from El Nino is keeping the artic air we’d normally be seeing in the U.S. up in the north and is the reason why it feels like April and I have every window in my house open.
I freely admit that I’m a weather slut: my mood, my disposition, my outlook, my libido all improve when the weather is good. I really should be living on a tropical island somewhere. Unfortunately most tropical islands have this one little problem: if you didn’t bring it, it ain’t there. That and the fact that you really can’t eat beauty and flying or cargo shipping in just about everything you need is really expensive keeps me firmly rooted where I am.
And yes, maybe we’ll be paying for this weather in the beginning of February with snow up to our asses (Um…do the people who live in Denver not know they live in Colorado?) or maybe we won’t. All I do know is that I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.
As Lake Superior University closes out 2006 with its list of banned words and phrases – those linguistic ticks that got too much media play in the past year – including the phrase “Ask your doctor” which it refers to as “The chewable vitamin morphine of marketing” The New York Times gives us something which I’d long suspected but could never prove:
For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.
You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.
Essay authors H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa Schwartz And Steven Woloshin go on to write:
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.
Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.
…
Most of us assume that all this additional diagnosis can only be beneficial. And some of it is. But at the extreme, the logic of early detection is absurd. If more than half of us are sick, what does it mean to be normal? Many more of us harbor “pre-disease” than will ever get disease, and all of us are “at risk.” The medicalization of everyday life is no less problematic. Exactly what are we doing to our children when 40 percent of summer campers are on one or more chronic prescription medications?
No one should take the process of making people into patients lightly. There are real drawbacks. Simply labeling people as diseased can make them feel anxious and vulnerable — a particular concern in children.
Having recently had my own run-in with the medical profession’s opaque manner in giving out information, it might be fair to say that I’m a little biased. But it’s hard not to be biased when in an hour of prime time television it’s possible to see up to half a dozen ads for drugs that you’re not quite sure what they do but you’re still left with the feeling that you really should “Ask your doctor.”
It hasn’t been that long since BigPharma turned menopause, a natural stage in a woman’s life, into a syndrome that requires treatment. How, then, do we reclaim our right to live our lives without the intervention of medicine into every minute of every day?
More pointedly, how to we break ourselves of the mindset, which is probably very distinctly an American trait, that unless we are perfectly comfortable all the time there must be something wrong…and there must be something we can do to correct the problem?
Cross posted in edited form to Amphetameme