I have yet to see a patriotic laxative commercial, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time. They’ll show some actors dressed up as hardworking country folk, maybe at a church picnic, smiling at each other and eating pieces of pie. At least one of them will be a black person. The Statue of Liberty will appear in the background. Then you’ll hear a country-style singer singing:
“Folks ‘round here they love this land; They stand by their beliefs; An’ when they git themselves stopped up; They want some quick relief.”
Well, what do you think? Pretty good commercial concept, huh?
Nah, you’re right. They’d never try to pull something like that. They’d put the statue in the foreground.
Why Not The Best?
Excellence is the trend of the eighties. Walk into any shopping-mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the bestsellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you’ll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don’t Steal It, etc.
The message of these books is that, here in the eighties, “good” is no longer good enough. In today’s business environment, “good” is a word we use to describe an employee whom we are about to transfer to a urinal-storage facility in the Aleutian Islands. What we want, in our eighties business executive, is somebody who demands the best in everything; someone who is never satisfied; somebody who, if he had been in charge of decorating the Sistine Chapel, would have said: “That is a good fresco, Michelangelo, but I want a better fresco, and I want it by tomorrow morning.”
This is the kind of thinking that now propels your top corporations. Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: “Imagine what it does to your teeth!” So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve.
But then along came Pepsi, with the bold new marketing concept of saying that its carbonated beverage was better, a claim that Pepsi backed up by paying $19 trillion to Michael Jackson, the most excellent musical genius of all time according to the cover story in Newsweek magazine. And so the folks at Coca-Cola suddenly woke up and realized that, hey, these are the eighties, and they got off their butts and improved Coke by letting it sit out in vats in the hot sun and adding six or eight thousand tons of sugar, the exact amount being a trade secret.
Unfortunately, the general public, having failed to read the market surveys proving that the new Coke was better, refused to drink it, but that is not the point. The point is, the Coke executives decided to strive for excellence, and the result is that the American consumer is now benefitting from the Most vicious carbonated-beverage marketing war in history. It wouldn’t surprise me if, very soon, one side or the other offered to pay $29
trillion to Bruce Springsteen, who according to a Newsweek magazine cover story is currently the most excellent musical genius of all time, preceded briefly by Prince.
This striving for excellence extends into people’s personal lives as well. When eighties people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an eighties couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves, waiting, their beepers going off like creckets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn’t have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.
An excellence-oriented eighties male does not wear a regular watch. He wears a Rolex, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Goer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence:
“The Rolex Hypetion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating hand-craftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100percent 24 karat gold. No watch parts or anything. just a great big chunk of gold on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn’t need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he’ll go to his twentieth reunion, and they’ll see his Rolex Hypetion. Hahahahyahahahahaha.”
Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today’s competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents’ faces. As an adult, he’ll carry around a little wallet card that says “7 x 9 = 63,” because it will remind him of mother.
I recently saw a videotape of people who were teaching their babies while they (the babies) were still in the womb. I swear I am not making this up. A group of pregnant couples sat in a circle, and, under the direction of an Expert in These Matters, they crooned instructional songs in the direction of the women’s stomachs. Mark my words: We will reach the point, in our lifetimes, where babies emerge from their mothers fully prepared to assume entry-level management positions. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has noticed, just wandering around the shopping mall, that more and more babies, the really brand-new modern ones, tend to resemble Lee Iacocca.
Making The World Safe For Salad
I’ve been thinking about technology of late, because, as you are no doubt aware (like fudge, you are), we recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Etch-a-Sketch. I think we can all agree that, except for long-lasting nasal spray, this is the greatest technological achievement of all time. Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals; drawing perfect verticals; drawing really spastic diagonals; trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside and try to figure out how it works (Mystery Rays from space, is what scientists now believe); and just generally enjoying the sheer childhood pleasure of snatching it away from your sister and shaking it upside down after she had spent 40 minutes making an elaborate picture of a bird.