My Fallow Americans,

There is a test, very well known in educational circles, called the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery, created by Richard Woodcock and Bonner Johnson. My 14-year-old daughter Holly took it recently. The first thing she noticed about the test (and immediately pointed out to the test giver) was that those two guys’ names are a nickname and an “n” away from containing five penis references. My, what an observant young lass. Makes a father proud.

Am I the only one who recoiled in horror upon glimpsing the new ad campaign from Bell Atlantic? The visual aspect of this campaign is made up entirely of Maurice Sendak illustrations and animation. These images are fun, engaging, beautiful, evocative, supportive of their strategy -- and depressing to see in an advertisement. His wonderfully rich illustrations, which have been irresistable to children and parents for years, are instantly diminished and debased by the mere fact of appearing in these ads. Is that what the client and the agency were hoping to accomplish? Certainly not. But they accomplished it anyway. Did it ever occur to anyone involved in this travesty, (Maurice Sendak, for instance), that it was the wrong thing to do? To leverage that very personal, intimate investment parents and their children have made in the Sendak World, for the purpose of selling a big phone company? Sendak sold his soul and he’s going to rot in Bell. Who next? Edward Gorey? Dr. Seuss? Must we in the advertising industry lay waste to every sound and image in our culture that carries any emotional weight? Every song, every cinematic moment, every formerly pure visual image? It makes me want to puke.

Below you’ll find the first letter to the editor of which I’ve been on the receiving end. Read it and you’ll get some sense of what I’ve had to contend with, sibling-wise, all my life. No wonder I’m like this.
Did I mention that I can do a respectable impression of one of those feng shui water fountain thingies? Well, I can.

Stoically,

 

Letter To The Editor

In grappling with the relation of advertising to business, I believe you have stepped into the arena referred to as the “contextually self-evident” in my logic-book-in-progress. The solution would seem to be that once you have truly understood what business is, your thoughts have already encompassed advertising, and vice versa. To someone who understands business, it is not possible to really isolate one or the other in one’s thoughts. Sort of like St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God (the ontological argument) where he held that to understand god already entails understanding that God exists. This, however, is not necessarily to deify advertising.

Anonymous pedant
Portales, NM

Editors reply:

So then, according to this “contextually self-evident” thing of yours, once one truly understands what life is, and what advertising is, one would inevitably realize that, without advertising, life itself would be impossible?
Isn’t the notion of contextual self-evidence itself contextually self-evident, if not just plain old tautological? As for St. Anselm, if I’m not mistaken, he’s dead.

 

“The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us not only that the universe is stranger than we supposed, but that it is stranger than we can suppose.” -- Robert Williams, Director, Space Telescope Science Institute.

“Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does.” - Epictetus

“[Bill Gates earns] $150 a second. Which means that if [he] saw or dropped a $500 bill on the ground, it wouldn’t be worth his time to take the four seconds required to bend over and pick it up.” - Bill Gates’s Wealth Index Web site

Cool Science Dept: There is now an instrument designed to detect light, which is so sensitive it can detect light reflected off a white sheet of paper by a 100 watt bulb from more than 18 miles away.

“Make haste slowly.” - Aldus

Did I just read that Coca-Cola translated its name into Chinese using characters that sound like “Ko-Kah Koh-Lah”,which means “Bite the wax tadpole”?