Spin Dry

Politics and advertising work on the same principal. Now, for a lot of you, the following may be one of those, "Well, duh" moments. But for far too many people in the world, particularly Americans, this information may come as a surprise -- which is a sad commentary on the state of education in this country.

Here's the principal: Manufacture a fear, then sell the solution. Seems pretty self-evident, doesn't it? And yet, we're bombarded with this on a daily basis and most of us don't see how we're being manipulated. The process is clear when a company is selling, say, burglar alarms or life insurance -- YOU'RE GOING TO GET ROBBED or YOU'RE GOING TO DIE AND LEAVE YOUR FAMILY HOMELESS... unless. But anything that's advertised (and sells) uses this technique. Anything and everything.

"Your cooch will stink -- unless you use our product." "Your cell phone company is ripping you off -- switch to us." "Hot chicks will ignore you -- unless you get sloshed on our brand of beer."

There's a commercial currently running in my media market that's selling home wireless networked DSL service. Okay, a pretty straight-forward product, but the set-up involves a father and teen-age son having a confrontation over who's going to use the DSL connection. Dad has a work proposal to submit. Son has to research a term paper. They face off like cowboys about to draw. (Side note: if I had a teenage son who talked to me the way this kid does to his father in the commercial, I'd smack him so hard upside the head that he'd be seeing stars until he collected social security.) Anyway, mom steps in to solve the problem -- DSL for everybody, blah blah blah. Your family will kill each other -- unless you sign up with us. (I'd say the real solution is better parenting, as in, "Sonny boy, when you're paying for the DSL, you get to use it first. Now back off.")

Anyway... this fear-mongering is the insidious result of capitalism. Yes, free enterprise has given us great stuff. Unfortunately, paranoia is the most effective selling tool. That's not really a fault of capitalism (communist regimes sold their politics the same way), it's a quirk of human nature. Approach what's safe, flee what's scary. However, it's gotten out of hand in several areas. For example -- how many new, dire, life-threatening conditions have been "discovered" and "cured" just within the last few years? Acid Reflux Disease. Social Anxiety Disorder. Overactive Bladder Syndrome. Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. (I'd call the latter "Adult lack of self-discipline," but that's another story.) But... it seems like the pharmaceutical industry has gotten tired of coming up with new names for old drugs (most of which are now generic) that treat the old standards -- high blood pressure, arthritis, osteoporosis, and general pain -- the advancing senility quartet. Nah. Can't make lots of money that way, so let's see what scary conditions we can create, cure and sell.

Does anyone ever consider that Acid Reflux or Overactive Bladder may be a result of flawed consumption, rather than any actual condition? Eat the wrong things, drink too much, end result heartburn or the need to pee. Social Anxiety Disorder? You'll never really get over that with a drug and, anyway, the old skool cure is called a good, stiff drink. Still a drug, but the pharmaceutical companies don't make any money off of it. (Oddly enough, they don't make any money hocking the cure for alcoholism, either, which is strange. Or not. Corporate bedfellows quite frequently make certain subjects taboo -- as in, you'll never see a major media company honestly investing in an anti-drinking campaign as long as they have their fingers in the major liquor companies. Oh, they'll pay lip service to stopping underage drinking, even while glamorizing it elsewhere.)

The more deadly meme that the drug companies are putting out is this one: Canadian drugs are inferior to ours, and they just may harm or kill you. Translation: "We don't make as much money when you buy that stuff, even though we still rake it in hand over fist, so we're going to do our damndest to keep you from doing it."

Here's the punchline: the only reason they claim that Canadian drugs are inferior is because they aren't approved by our FDA. They don't bother to mention that Canada has an equivalent body, doing the same things our FDA does. They also don't mention that Canada is an industrialized nation, with manufacturing processes equivalent to ours. Finally, they don't bother to mention where Canada gets a lot of the drugs that they later export. Why, they get 'em from the American drug companies, of course. They also pay a lot less, because the Canadian government isn't getting its salad regularly tossed by those same companies. And so we come to a funny full-circle: the drug companies are forced to sell their product at a fair market price to Canada, and are doing everything in their power to then keep Canada from selling those same drugs back to Americans, who should be getting the drugs direct from the American companies at the fair price in the first place.

All the while, they identify new diseases, come up with new cures, and screw you red white and blue with the bill. Ah, the American way.

Speaking of screwed... our government has perfected the Selling with Fear tactic, the perfect case in point being the recent announcement that "THE EVIL-DOERS™ ARE GOING TO ATTACK US AGAIN -- UNLESS YOU GIVE US MORE MONEY AND MORE POWER AND TURN IN YOUR NEIGHBORS..."

The ad campaign had all the usual bells and whistles -- concerned looking AG and Homeland Security Tsar making dire pronouncements and showing pictures of seven "Terrorists" ("Oh, Martha, look -- most of 'em are scary Arabs!"), even while having nothing but vague mutterings about possible plots and targets. Kind of odd. I mean, if we know they're ninety per cent ready to attack, we should have a pretty good idea of what they're intending to attack. On top of that, one of the Most Wanted has vanished and is apparently either in Pakistani custody or a guest of Gitmo; another has either been arrested or is dead; a third is most likely out of the country, and seems to be nothing more than a Southern California kid who committed the sin of converting to Islam. (Department of Censorship note: they aired an interview with the kid's aunt yesterday on the news. The first time it ran, it seemed unedited -- she rambled on and on, pretty much raving and coming across as a total lunatic as she tried to attribute his winding up on the list to listening to Heavy Metal music, which she insisted that everyone, but everyone, thought was just noise. Subsequent airings of the same interview snipped it down to the few sound bites that make her appear lucid and rational.)

Final nail in the coffin of this Administration dog and pony show, though, is that the information upon which all of this is based is rather old, and has already been discounted -- and the group allegedly plotting doesn't even exist.

But hey, W's really, really crappy performance in Monday's speech has pretty much fallen off the news radar, hasn't it? All I have to say to that is, "Ab... aboo-boo... abu. Gaa-rape..."