Archive for category Mother Culture
If You See Something, Say Something
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on November 18th, 2011
I should really not go outside. Every time I travel, I get exposed to public service announcements and commercials and retail sales, and I just feel like an alien, wandering through some foreign landscape, simultaneously bewildering, upsetting, and mildly threatening.
I’ll bite. “What’s wrong with this picture?” My first answer: It plays on vague stereotypes to perpetuate a culture of fear and suspicion without doing anything meaningful to increase actual security. Survey says? Aww… not even on the board.
It took me some minutes of pondering to realize that the person in the foreground, looking at his cell phone, is not the only relevant one in the picture. The person in the background, gazing into the open “Authorized Personnel Only” door is more than window dressing. The message, I suppose, is, “Get off your cell phone you careless fuck, and pay attention, because terrorists could be RIGHT BEHIND YOU!”
Now I spend more than an average amount of time in airports, and I will tell you that every single time I go past one of those “Authorized Personnel Only” doors and it’s open, I look inside. I want to know what’s inside the secret room! Don’t you? I’ll let you in on the secret. It’s usually lockers. And a break room. This sign is suggesting that my fellow traveler should call the airport police to report my innocent inquisitiveness.
Ah, but I’m clearly not a threat. Just look at me, all not wearing a backpack (slung over one shoulder), jeans, and a hoodie. Apparently, backpacks and hoodies are the new uniform of The Enemy. It’s always interesting to see how propaganda codes The Enemy, since it tells you who, exactly, the Powers That Be see as a threat. The backpack (slung over one shoulder), hoodie, and jeans code for youth. I’m not suggesting that the creator of this image intentionally coded for youth. I’m just saying that they called up in their mind the ideal image of The Enemy, and it happens to be youth. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure they still hate Arabs too.
PS: Black people, congratulations. Arabs and Uppity Youth have pushed you far enough down the Hierarchy of Prejudice that you occasionally get to be protagonists on fear-propaganda posters. Maybe someday, we’ll even have a black President!
Who is that person looking into that door? Is it a terrorist? Or is it a curious passerby? Or is it an employee, a hoodie pulled over his uniform, going to or coming from work? How the fuck am I supposed to judge that? In fact, I, and the rest of the random people at the airport, are completely unqualified to make the judgement of whether someone is authorized to enter a sensitive area of the airport. And we all know that, which is why we are incredibly unlikely to bother reporting anything as mildly suspicious as a person looking into a “Authorized Access Only” door. This sign is not going to do anything to change that. This sign is not going to get us to look up from our cell phone, never mind bother to report some tiny potential infraction to airport police. All this sign is going to do is remind us that the Powers That Be want us to be afraid.
But hey! As long as I’m completely unqualified to judge who is and isn’t authorized to enter a secure area anyway, why default to not reporting. Why not do what the sign is suggesting and default to reporting. “Officer! I saw a woman in the janitor’s closet! She appeared to be pretending to arrange the cleaning supplies!” “Officer! I saw a man go into the pilot’s lounge. He was even wearing a pilot’s uniform, which is just what a terrorist would do if he wanted to scout the pilot’s lounge!” “Officer! There’s a man with a gun right in front of me! It’s you!”
USA Today’s Propaganda
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Government and Law, Mother Culture on January 26th, 2011
It’s been a while since I served up a frothing mug of culturally-induced bile; it’s's been a while since I went on a business trip too. The two are definitely related. The more time I spend exposing myself to the Voice Of My Culture (media), the more I find to comment on. Business trips are good for blogging, but bad for my sanity.
Case in point: this article from USA Today:
The sub-heading was what really caught my eye and made me sputter: “Purposely put at risk by insurgents.” Am I to infer that the author of this article has entered the mind of the “insurgents,” Being John Malkovich-style, and determined that the civilian casualties were purposeful? Of course not. So what’s the source for this statement? Unlike most cases where a newspaper trumpets a piece of government propaganda, the source of the message is explicitly acknowledged in this very article. Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, is quoted as saying, “The enemy put civilians purposely at great risk by its tactics and actions.” Well, shit. A Pentagon spokesperson got to write the sub-heading of your article. Now there’s an unbiased source if ever I heard one. Good journalism, USA Today!
Of course, the U.S. has also caused civilian casualties, but presumably those were not “purposeful.” Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “tautologically those were not purposeful.” When the U.S. military causes civilian death, the American media assumes that reasonable efforts were taken to avoid that outcome. “Our” enemies are not afforded the same courtesy.
How much does the U.S. military actually care about avoiding civilian casualties? The answer, once again, is right here in this very article! From the invasion in 2003 to 2007, four years, the U.S. cared so much about civilian casualties that they, “did not show much interest in tracking [them]…. It didn’t see population protection as central to the mission or our core responsibility.” Who’s purposely putting civilians at risk again?
It disgusts me that this type of propaganda is passed off as reporting.
Hyperbolic Exceptionalism
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing, Mother Culture on September 10th, 2010
The myth of progress expresses itself in our culture in numerous ways, some more subtle than others. One of these is a hyperbolic focus on exceptionalism. I thought of this when I saw a sign in a grocery store:
Now, some may see this simply as an example of hyperbole in marketing, but I was bowled over by the degree to which the sign took that premise. “Uncompromised” quality? Really? Because I’m willing to bet you compromised quality at least a little bit in the name of, for example, price. Realistically, you contracted with Boar’s Head, and whatever they deliver, you sell. “Uncompromised quality,” by itself, might be chalked up to everyday advertising hyperbole, but the sign-maker took it one step further. Not only is the store’s quality uncompromised, it is uncompromised Every Single Day. This is, of course, redundant. Quality that’s uncompromised, except on Tuesdays, is compromised, isn’t it?
Why doesn’t the idea of “uncompromised quality” invoke the same reaction in the reader as the idea of an “airborne submarine”? The reason, I think, is that neither the sign-maker nor the reader are taking the sign literally. The expansionist myth tells us that growth and expansion are good and stasis or contraction is death. From there, we extrapolate that everything in the world must constantly get “better.” Ultimately, this touches off an arms race of exaggeration in marketing, which leads to “the best” being the only thing that is even “good enough,” and something as mediocre as a grocery store deli counter needs to offer “Quality Uncompromised Every Single Day” just to move lunch meat. This sign is the marketing equivalent of the male peacock’s feathers: evolved to a preposterously impractical extreme, but expected by its intended audience, and so required.
Here’s a slightly less extreme example of the same idea. Coffee cups made “without compromise.”
These goldfish crackers invite you to “Never Have An Ordinary Day.” Setting aside for a minute the preposterous notion that goldfish crackers are what separates an ordinary day from an extraordinary one, the fact is that most days are ordinary, that’s what makes them ordinary. Again, this is not intended to be taken literally, but isn’t it interesting what direction the symbolism has gone?
Know Your Euphemisms: “Family”
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on September 6th, 2010
What’s a family? According to Websters it’s, “a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head.” But the word is used euphemistically, usually to refer to a heterosexual couple with children, as illustrated by this sign.
When I see a sign like this, I like to try to challenge my cultural programming by, for example, imagining that it is depicting a family consisting of a skirt-wearing transgendered man, a bull-dyke in overalls, and a dwarf.
The same euphemism appears in the phrase, “family friendly,” which is meant to imply appropriateness for children. The major flaw in this usage is that people’s idea of what’s appropriate for children varies widely, and here we see the unification tactic in play. It’s the same tactic that is used when all citizens of the United States are lumped together under the label of “Americans,” and are then expected to stand together behind the same set of values or be labeled as dissidents. Getting back to the core focus of this post, however, not all families have children, so saying that something is “family friendly” when you mean, “appropriate for children,” is simply inaccurate.
What connotations does the word “family” have for you? In what ways does your definition of the word match and not match reality?
Selling My Townhome
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing, Mother Culture on August 22nd, 2010
I’ve written before about the cultural Myth of Progress and the “expansionist drive” that supports it. Another way of expressing these ideas is to simply say that, in our culture, enough is never enough.
That idea has been coming to mind as I move forward on the process of selling my townhome in Georgia. I bought the home in 2004, which, if you’ve been paying attention to historical housing prices, just made you cringe. That was, literally, just before the bubble burst. Since the bubble hadn’t popped yet, you could still get an 80/20 mortgage with zero down payment and no PMI, which is exactly how I was able to move from a 2-bedroom rental apartment into an 1800-square-foot townhome, basically at the drop of a hat. One day, I woke up and decided it was time to own instead of rent, and a few months later, I had moved into my new home. Okay, it wasn’t exactly that simple, but closer than you might think.
I paid a total of $167,000 for the home. Within the next few years, I would hear on the news about housing prices tanking, but I didn’t think much about it, because I had no immediate plans to sell. My time horizon for moving was 5-10 years out, and I figured I’d deal with the situation when the time came.
Of course, the housing market didn’t improve. In June of 2009, I moved into a group-living situation with some friends and decided to rent the townhome out. By July of 2010, I had bought a home in Knoxville and relocated entirely. The housing market was a little better in 2010 than they had been in 2009 (at least in part due to the tax credit, which I didn’t know at the time), so I decided not to rent again, but to sell.
Lots of financial advisers would tell me that this is the absolute worst time to sell. The housing market in general is still depressed compared to 2004. There are three to five units for sale on my street, and there have been for the last three years. There have been two sales on my street in that time period, in the range of $140k to $150k. At least one of the units for sale is a foreclosure. Many units are empty, their owners apparently still continuing to pay, since no foreclosure signs have shown up, but it doesn’t bode well for the neighborhood. The conventional advice for this situation is to ride it out and wait for the housing market to rebound.
Rebound to what? Rebound to the point where the home can be sold for at least as much as you paid for it, of course. And that’s where we come to the Myth of Progress. Everything is seen through the lens of profit and loss, except the scale is distorted. Lack of profit counts as a loss and profit is barely seen as breaking even.
Consider this: thanks to a generous contract on a book that I wrote, I was able to dump a bunch of money into the mortgage on the townhome. I put the money into the mortgage, instead of some other investment, at least partly in preparation for this very situation. The principle on the loan is currently about $120k, so theoretically, I could sell the house for as little as $120k, plus my agent’s commission, and walk away clean.
Most people would be horrified at that prospect. If I bought at $167k, sold at $120k, they would count that as a $47,000 loss. The only factor that would come to their mind would be the starting number and the ending number, and the Myth of Progress says that the ending number must be higher than the starting number or you have failed. But here’s how I think of it: if I had continued renting my apartment, I would have paid about $1,000 a month for five years. That’s $60,000 to live in a 2-bedroom apartment. Instead, I paid $47,000, or $783 a month ($885 if you add in the HOA dues) to live in a beautiful townhome, about twice the size of the apartment, that I loved dearly. And that’s not even counting the approximately $5k to $10k in interest that I was able to write off on my taxes! Sounds like a bargain to me.
Of course, the speculators will say that if I hold onto the townhome, the market will eventually recover, and I will be able to sell it for more. By my own logic, selling for $150k might count as a profit, even if it’s numerically a loss. That’s true, but making a profit isn’t my primary goal. I’m not interested in wringing the maximum amount out of every single transaction. I just want to have “enough,” and I think that’s where the Myth of Progress most leads us astray. It makes us view every transaction through the lens of maximalization. The question is always whether you have gotten everything you possibly could, not whether you got “enough” to satisfy yourself.
For me, “breaking even” and walking away from the townhome clean would be “enough,” and any cash I get out on top of that would be “profit.”
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