Apologies for my cynicism

Secret Santas are sweeping the nation, paying off the layaway accounts of a few random lucky members of the 99%. Wonderful Christmas time story to warm the cockles of even Scrooge's heart, right?

“It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year,” said Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice president for layaway.

Then why are they for the most part only paying off accounts at Kmart? And how does she know exactly?

Oh, sure, we'll start to hear about copycats (and good for them, unless of course they're from a competing HQ in Bentonville). But this smacks of a purely cynical guerrilla marketing campaign. It's brilliant in its way, but at bottom there's a soul-killing ugliness to the willingness to leverage small money into tremendous free media.

If you want to prove that the problem is in my heart, not in the hearts of the secret Santas, find out who called the press. Acts of generosity that happen when no one is looking don't make good copy unless a writer is tipped off.

I'd really like to be wrong about this. But I think it's not even noblesse oblige, instead fakery.

While I'm on the topic, one more thing about layaway: The need for layaway shows how far the middle class has fallen. You only need layaway if you can't get a few hundred dollars in credit. Layaway terms are one-sided - the poor consumer pays and pays and pays and still has to keep returning to the store. This is the world of widespread penury that Republicans want to return us to. So that we'll be more cowed and leave their sponsors an ever larger share of the pie.

Lalala, not listening

The shroud of Turin is a fake, proven so by radiometric dating. This story, even though it's skeptical, fails to mention this proof. Instead, it merely points out how different the 2000-year-old shroud (not of Jesus) is from the forgery.

These new facts won't change many minds, if any. We live in an age when many people are immune to new learning. Nothing can convince them to change their beliefs. Nothing. They chose what they believe. They didn't reason about it. They won't reason about it now.

People like this have been common throughout history. I don't have evidence (and could be argued out of this belief), but I don't think there's any reason to believe that unreason is significantly more represented in the population now than in other eras.

The difference, I think, is that unreason is now a market, a segment of the population that will self-identify and provide access to its assets for the harvesting of profit. The prevalence of stupidity may not have changed, but its influence has grown markedly because mass marketing has given way to narrow, segmented marketing.

And, of course, stupidity is not that narrow a demographic.

All the same deck chairs

You think Newt and Sarah are trying to get on board?

The Republican establishment is ossified, schlerotic. Now they're going to slap a "New Improved" sticker on the packaging and launch a campaign to convince the weak-minded that the same tired formulas are different - because they have a "New Improved" sticker on the package.

Duhbyomacy

Click image for full (week-old) Mike Luckovich cartoon.

Not that Iran's really a responsible party, but it makes a good laugh.

Duhbya has excused North Korea from the axis of evil. Could Iran be next with a get out of dutch free card? Then Duhbya will claim the conquest of the whole axis as his legacy. Sow's ear, silk purse, ah, the magic of Republican marketing.

Marketing debases

All the major corporations jumping on the green bandwagon really care about only one kind of green. As soon as the environment is no longer profitable for them - or no longer as profitable as they think the next trend could be - they'll drop it.

Most Americans don't seem to distinguish between the underlying truth and marketing truthiness. We need to.

A little random history:

• We bought cigarettes because they were associated with coolness.
• We bought beer because it was associated with sex (never goes out of style).
• We bought SUVs because they were associated with macho and safety.
• We bought Duhbya because he was associated with regular guys (despite the patent, obvious unreality of this claim).
• We bought bad loans because we were suckers.
• We bought the Iraq war because it was associated with al Qaeda (only in the marketing, of course).

We really need to turn our collective bullshit detectors back on and then turn them up.

How did we get here?

In 1978, there was talk of electing a veto-proof Democratic Congress because the President was too conservative. That President was a Democrat, Jimmy Carter.

In 2007, we have at long last in Duhbya-world a Democratic Congress. The voters elected the swing Democrats because it was finally clear to enough people that Iraq was a debacle. Even though cool heads had amply predicted every last problem that has beset Iraq, the jingoistic march to war had shunted them aside - off TV and radio and even mostly out of newsprint - as so many unhonored Cassandras.

One issue was more important to me than Iraq, though not to the voters. That was the utter, total, absolute, and complete failure of unified Republican government to retain any semblance of separation of powers, so great its fealty was to the Bushist cult of personality. During their dominance of American politics from the 1930s to the 1970s, Democrats in the Congress repeatedly refused to be handmaidens to the President, whether Democratic or Republican. The Republican Congresses of 2001 to 2006 had no interest in leaving the country and the Constitution better off, as long as they could leave the conservative movement better off. And, oh yeah, as long as they could fatten up their friends at the public trough.

Oversight? Are you kidding me!

How did we get here?

I see four reasons:

• Republicans concluded that their program of government could never get them into the majority if presented honestly, even after forty years of halting movement to the center, so they built a political apparatus that was primarily concerned with marketing.
• Democrats unilaterally surrendered their most potent political weapon and the unifying attribute of their political coalition - social class.
• The media gave up the difficult work of separating truth out of the routine lies and bullshit of politics and made its purpose the reinforcement of conventional wisdom.
• The voters turned down their bullshit detectors. Or off. (Some examples.) So many people were telling them that self-government is too hard that they believed it.

I'll get into each of these in time.

Propaganda conduits

Why is it so easy for advertisers to turn ordinary nouns into slogans? The network that carries the event is probably contractually obligated to stuff marketing slogans into the title. I hope they get a discount because this dilutes their own ability to sell "messages". But why a print reporter, for instance, would ever use the whole venal phrase I don't get.

(Originally here.)