The Vagisil Half-Time Report, Brought to You By Cialis

This Wired blog post by Tom Long, was orginally found
here
"Whoa! Check out those babies. Nice branding, baby."

Well, why the hell not? I mean, is there anything out there that isn't branded these days?

Using symbols and slogans and logos to sell a product or a company has been around for as long as there have been products and companies to sell. But selling, like so much else in this increasingly hyper and over-hyped world of ours, has mutated into something uglier -- call it consumer marketing.

Technology's march only serves the beast. Each advance (if advancing is what it is) diffuses the way we get our information. If we now have 3,089 ways of taking in news and information, the marketing swine will find 3,089 ways of shoving their "buy this" message down your throat, whether you want to hear it or not. There is no escape.

With hundreds of thousands of marketers out there, clamoring to be heard over the din of their collective, orgiastic whoring, you can't read anything, watch anything or go anywhere without a ceaseless assault on your senses. The message, regardless of how subliminal, never varies: Buy this, own this, drink this, drive this, wear this, be this. In order to be cool, you must consume consume consume.

And we flock to the message like proverbial lambs to the slaughter. How many Americans are being eaten alive by consumer debt in order to drive the coolest car, waste a life in front of the coolest computer or plasma-screen TV, drop a bundle in the coolest vacation spot? Ads in glossy magazines -- peopled by hard-bodied, edgy young models Photoshopped to impossible perfection -- determine our look, our smell, even our 'tude. We can all be rebels, man, and look really chic doing it.

Everything's a commodity now, just another way for somebody to make money off of somebody else. Have you watched a baseball game on TV lately? The game itself is almost secondary to all the selling going on, and I mean during the game. Highlights -- the big hit, a great play -- are not simply replayed for your enjoyment. They're sponsored by advertisers, giving us such inanities as "the Toyota Drive of the Game" (big hit) and "the Carl's Jr. In Your Face Play of the Game" (great play).

It seems as if every graphic that flashes on screen, whether it's the score and count or the out-of-town scores, has a corporate logo attached to it. Every other televised sport, from hockey to football, is just as bad.

Marketing's fingerprints are all over popular culture these days. In Hollywood, the art of "product placement" in a mainstream movie gets nearly as much attention as the casting of its prepackaged, bankable star. Plot? Character development? Whatever.

Watch enough of this crap and you become desensitized to it, which, of course, is just what They want you to do. Docile consumers don't think too much, which makes them pliant and easy to sell to.

What's the problem with that, you ask. Simply, mass consumption diminishes us. We shed our individuality like snakeskin to conform to whatever commercial whim is defining "individuality" at a given moment. Think different? How many Apple owners are out there, anyway? Millions? How iconoclastic is that? You want to "think different"? Throw your damned computer out the window and brush up on your cursive.

Surrendering your individuality in order to fit in, to belong, is to surrender both your critical-thinking ability and that natural skepticism so vital to being fully engaged in a participatory, democratic society. The price we pay for sitting back and doing and questioning nothing, distracted by the accumulation of useless stuff while our so-called leaders run amok in the world, has never been more evident than it is today.

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