Dear Fellow Sentient Beings,

Congratulations are in order. I took myself out to lunch for my bi-annual performance review recently. ( As a cost-cutting measure, I went from an 18 month review cycle to a 2 year cycle.) I identified several areas for improvement: Think faster, take fewer naps, enhance proofeading skills, partner with myself better. But overall, I felt I’ve been performing at or above expectations.

I reviewed my recent accomplishments:

• Helped create the first unified international ad campaign -- TV and print -- for Lions Clubs International whose raison d’etre is conquering blindness (Tag: For All The World To See), via Ketchum Public Relations and Rapp Collins Worldwide;
• Helped create the first bonafide TV spot for the Make-A-Wish Foundation (Tag: Wishing Children Well), via Beyond DDB;
• Wrote the first radio advertising for Chilli Man Chili (Tag: Chili the way you like it, however you like it. Couldn’t sell them on “One ‘L’ Of A Chili With Two “L”s In The Name), via Marketing Edge;
• Pitched and won London-based Reckless Records and Stuart Brent Children’s Book Club -- Note To Arthur: Please disregard the following paranthetical note -- (working with art director extaordinaire and all- around odd guy Darch Clampitt);
• worked on many other fulfilling projects which space and political considerations preclude me from naming.

As a result, I was pleased to promote myself from Senior Copymeister to The Communicaterer, which of course entails a hefty raise. I wished myself the best of luck and assured myself that I would rise to the challenges of this new position.

I was thinking about the paradox of advertising the other day. On the one hand, advertising is a profoundly trivial pursuit. It’s not important. It bears no weight. It’s fleeting, and almost entirely empty -- a faint reflection of the culture it infests. No one (outside the business) ever died of advertising. At its best, it’s artful fluff. Most of the time, no one knows if it works. And the vast majority of the world’s population couldn’t care less. Yet I’ve maintained in
front of many a copywriting class over the years (and I actually believe) that our entire free enterprise system, and consequently the American Culture as we know it wouldn’t, and in fact, couldn’t exist without advertising. It’s an absolutely indispensable part of the equation. If capitalism is a machine, advertising is the 10W-40. If capitalism is an organism, it’s the autonomic nervous system. If capitalism is -- well, that’s enough metaphoricalisthenics.
Advertising is reviled and enshrined. It comprises both the worst and the best stuff on TV. It’s the poetry of commerce. And the most derivative drivel any society has yet managed to squeeze through its collective rectum. It can be Art, or reprehensible, contemptible trash -- the awfullest offal of all. As popular art, it has intrinsic value beyond its stated purpose of selling stuff (for which, ironically, its value is, at best, indeterminate.) I know I should make a point here soon, but I don’t really have one. I just like to think about advertising sometimes, because it sucks and it’s pretty cool at the same time.

Of course, as Theodore Sturgeon once wrote, “90% of everything is crap.”
By the way, I’ll bet you piasters to pasta that my brother Don, who incidentally, has just moved to Portales, NM., where he will be Head of both the Accounting Department and the Philosophy Department (!?) at ENMU(!?), will challenge my characterization of advertising as a paradox. He’d probably call it a conundrum or an enigma or some such less logically rigorous word. But he’s in New Mexico so who cares.

With my daughter starting high school and my son eyeing colleges, education dominates my consciousness, and consequently, this issue of Write Between The Eyes.

Stoically,

 

“The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.” - John Dewey

“Knowldege which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” - Plato

Definitions of education:
Capacity for further education - John Dewey

Reeling and writhing and different branches of arithmetic - ambition, distraction, uglification and derision. - Lewis Carroll

Hanging around until you’ve caught on. - Robert Frost

Something said in private conversation one day in the street, a remark by a teacher in the middle of a discussion, a book picked up in someone’s room. - Harold Taylor

A thing I read in the paper: In Gainesville, Fla., a throat cancer patient died after setting himself on fire trying to light a cigar. He was unable to yell for help because his illness had cost him his vocal cords.