Ad Age Adage: Old Superbowl Snarl

Ad Age Adage

Got milk? Then shut up and drink it.

by Scott McNutt

This "New Millennium" is the Advertising Age. Our Pavlov-dog-like anticipation of new Superbowl commercials proves it. THAT's "waaaaassssuuupp!"

You may say, "So what? Civilization is new and improved, society is fresher, stronger, and anti-static! So where's the beef?" Here's my beef: Advertising...It's everywhere you want to be. Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener, that is what I'd truly like to be, 'cause if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener, then I wouldn't have ears to hear crap like this.

I don't care if it's butter or Parkay! I don't care if I can have it my way! I don't want it! I want the inundation of advertising to cease. I'd give Arsenio Hall a buck or two to shut up. I'd walk a mile to avoid a Camel ad, but Calgon would still find me and take me away. I'd head for the mountains and hide in the bush, but that's Ford country now. Advertising excess: You won't leave home without it.

How do I spell relief? N-o—A-d-s. Yo quiero Taco Bell to go to hell! Thank God they finally put that rat-dog out of my misery! But that isn't enough. I deserve a break today. I need a day without advertising that isn't like a day without sunshine. I need something that will put a tiger in my tank, 'cause I've fallen and I can't get up. I need a quicker picker-upper that isn't Folger's in my cup.

I'm part of the Pepsi Generation, whether I want to be or not. No, I wouldn't like to be a Pepper, too. I don't want to have a Coke or a smile. Screw perfect harmony, I'd like to teach the ad world to sting. If I let my fingers do the walking to reach out and touch someone, it'd be Snap! Crackle! and Pop! time for Madison Avenue types. I wish those marketing geniuses had ring around the collar. A ring of my fingerprints, that is. I'd squeeze their Charmin, but good! After I was done, they'd be stuck on band-aids, 'cause band-aids would be stuck on them. Like mummies.

But advertising takes a licking and keeps on ticking. It just keeps going and going and going and—AAAAAGGH! Pontiac is driving me crazy! This is my brain. This is my brain on ads. Any questions? Yes: Can't we stop the madness? 'Cause sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don't. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Why not go for the gusto? Let's really make quality job #1. You know, truly be all that we can be, instead of some hyped-up idea of what Madison Avenue wants us to think we have to be. Let's just say "no" to advertisers. Or get a piece of the rock, and give them a nice Hawaiian punch with it. Remember, Smokey Bear says, "Only you can prevent advertisers."

Just do it! Once we got started whupping advertisers, I bet we couldn't beat just one. Thrashing them would double our pleasure, double our fun. It'd be good to the last drop-kick we laid into their larded butts. They'd be flying the friendly skies after that. Pop, pop, fist, fist! Oh, what a relief it is!

After that, Bo knows we won't have to say it with flowers. When we care enough to send the very best, we'll say it in plain English; doesn't matter if it's live or Memorex, so long as it's straightforward. Honest communication is mm, mm, good! It's the real thing!

Because children are the future, we need to start them on this anti-advertising, pro-plain-speaking regimen now. I mean, look at me: I can't believe I ate the whole advertising thing for all those years. I even believed it was finger-lickin' good. For a better tomorrow, choosy mothers will choose not to let their children know that Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. The choice of a new generation will be not to care that a little dab'll melt in your mouth, not in your hands, as long as we sell no wine before it's Miller time. If you do this, your child will become a shining example for his peers. Someday, they'll look at him and say, "He likes it! Hey, Mikey!" 

 
Originally appeared: http://www.metropulse.com/dir_zine/dir_2001/1103/t_snarls.html

God Joins an Anger Management Group: Revised, amended and expanded

God Joins an Anger Management Group: A Passionate Play of Dialogue

by Scott McNutt

Setting: a nondescript room in which a half-dozen nondescript individuals, some sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups, have seated themselves among a dozen chairs arranged in a semicircle, facing a central chair; before this chair stands a slight, bearded, bespectacled middle-aged male wearing a white lab coat.

Group counselor (the bearded, bespectacled individual): Hello, everybody! Today, we're welcoming a new member to our Angerholics Anonymous group. (gestures to figure approaching from doorway: billowing white robe, flowing white beard and fierce white eyebrows frame an imperiously craggy face)

God (whispering to counselor): Uh, what do I do?

GC (gently): Just take a place in the group, introduce yourself, and tell us about yourself, about why you are here.

God (to GC): OK. (moves to stand in front of a chair, then, to group): Ahem, hi, I'm God Alm-

GC (pleasantly, but firmly): First names only, God.

God: Ah, OK. Well, anyway, I'm God.

Group: Hi, God!!!

God: But I'm also known as Yahweh, Jehovah, The Lo-

GC: First names only, The. So you have a lot of street names? Do you suppose that tells us more about you than just one name? Which name do you prefer?

God: Uh, God will do, I guess...

GC: Great! So! Tell us about yourself?

God: Well, it's not really so much about Me. I mean, My Son, He wanted Me to come here.

GC: Can you tell us why he might have wanted that?

God (long pause): Well, I guess maybe He thinks I have...issues...

GC: What kind of issues?

God: Well, you have to look at it from My Perspective. My People, the Israelite tribe-

GC: Your tribe? Are these your homeboys? Is your gang called the Israelites?

God (staring): Excuse me?

GC: Never mind. I apologize for interrupting. I'm just trying to be sure we understand where you're coming from.

God (to GC): From heaven, thank you. (resuming to group): So you have to understand, My People, the Israelites, were surrounded on every side by enemies. So I had to be...extreme with some of them... (long pause)

GC (gently): Tell the group what you did, God.

God: Well, a lot of things. More than I can remember, really. For instance, I ordered the sons of Levi to kill all their neighbors, about 3,000 of them, and I had Moses kill all the Amorites. And Moses led My People to victory in battle with the Midanites. So I told him to kill all their males, even the kids, and the women who were not virgins, but to take all the remaining 32,000 virgins, young and old, as booty. I let him decide how to determine who was a virgin. I bet he enjoyed that! (chuckles, pausing as if thinking back)

Where was I? Oh, yes, foreign virgins. But when one of My Tribe brought home a foreign woman as his wife, I was pleased that Phinehas threw a spear with such force that it went through the Israelite man and through his foreign woman's belly. I was really pleased by that. So pleased that I decided not to bring the plague down on the Children of Israel.

GC: So you have done some harsh, extreme, some might even say cruel things. But sometimes these actions you take or order, they are contradictory?

God: Not to My Eyes.

GC: OK, we'll move on from that. Is there anything else?

God: Oh, yes, lots more. Like I said, more than I can remember.

GC: All right, we'll leave that alone for now. So why did your son want you to come here? (long pause)

GC (prodding): God?

God: OK! Maybe I- Maybe I toy with lesser beings sometimes. Like that whole business with putting the Tree of Knowledge smack in the middle of the Garden of Eden and then telling Adam and Eve they could eat of any fruit except from that tree. Of course I knew they were going to eat it! I just wanted to punish them, I like inflicting punishments, it's how I get my kicks, so what.

Or ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering to prove his loyalty to me. He was going to do it! Just before he shivs the little brat, I sent him a goat to do instead. You should have seen the look on Abraham's face when the goat showed up! A gag for the ages, that!

GC: Let's talk about this concept of "lesser beings." What do you suppose this tells the group about you? Maybe we might get the impression that you feel a little superior?

God: Well, I am The Alm-

GC (sharply), God (in unison, mimicking): "First names only, The!"

God (grumbling): Right, right, just call me "Almighty."

GC: OK, let's move on. So your son pointed out that you toy with other people?

God (mellowing, sitting down): Well, it's more than that. Truth to tell, I started feeling bad about some of the...things I had done, even to My Tribe. The truth is, I was a real bastard, especially to them. Really, it went on forages. I was always hardening my heart toward them and turning my face from them and bringing pestilence on them and sending foreign marauders among them and having thousands of My Tribe stolen away into slavery. Terrible stuff, really. Heh. I was such a stinker. Anyhoo, you want the full story, you can read it in My Autobiography, The Old Testament.

GC: So, after all that, how did you feel, God?

God: Well, after that, and the destruction of the temple, the scattering of the Tribes, I...I dunno exactly. I just began to feel a little... (pause)

GC (gently): Tell us what you felt, God.

God: It’s like this. I’d had sort of a…covenant with My Tribe, but with some of them in slavery and just sort of spread hither and thither across the Middle East, the agreement was really just a shambles at this point. I just kind of…wanted to make amends, start a new chapter, you know? I wanted to…give something back to the world.

GC: Good, good. Let it all out...

God: So, I thought about it and came up with a plan. I raped this girl from Nazareth...

GC (gasps, then recovers composure): You raped a girl to give something back to the world?

God: Exactly! Wasn't it a cool idea? I gave the world My Son. And then I arranged for the world to torture Him and kill Him. Whaddya think? (long pause)

God (repeats): Whaddya think?

GC: OK, let me see if I have this straight: You commit murder and mayhem your entire existence, decide you want to start fresh, so you rape a girl to have a son because you want to have him murdered to make up for all the wrong you'd done?

God: No, no, his death would atone for all the wrongs everybody'd ever done or would do. Isn't it brilliant? Whaddya think?

GC: I think we're all out of time for this week. (to group) Same time next week?

God (growing impatient): No. I want to know what you think.

GC (soothingly, reassuringly): We have to be considerate of the schedules of everyone in the group, God. If we're going to get you through this, you are going to need everyone's input. You want that, don't you? Isn't that what your son wants you to want?

God (rising to his feet in anger): You shouldn't concern yourself with what He wants. You'll concern yourself with what I want if you know what's good for you!

GC: (still soothing): Why are you so angry, God? Is there something you aren't admitting to yourself?

God: There can't beanything I'm not admitting to Myself; I am all-knowing!

GC: (quietly): What about your son?

God: What about Him?

GC: The truth is, he didn't ask you to come here, did he?

God: You dare to question the Word of The Lord!?

GC: First names only, The. Look, if he's dead, if you had him killed, he couldn't have told you to come here, could he? This rage you have, it's all about the guilt you feel for having him killed, isn't it?

God (starting forward, shouting in his anger): You deny the truth of the resurrection?

GC (gently, backpedaling): Now, God, perhaps you meant it symbolically that your son told you to come here, or perhaps you believe his spirit was speaking to you...

God: Don't even bring the Holy Spirit into this! We're not on speaking terms!

GC: OK, now you've lost me...

God (contemptuously): Lost! You were never found! Never saved! You gentiles make me puke! Pfah! Pfah! (sounds of puking)

GC: I'm sorry, what does this have to do with your dead son...?

God: You deny the Miracle of Resurrection! You've taken His Name in vain! I am a Wrathful God! The Lord is a Man of War! I-

GC: First names only, The!

God: That's it! You're getting the ravenous bears I set upon the punk kids who mocked My Prophet Elisha's baldness! Sic 'em bruins! (shrieks from AA group members, gradually fading)

Jesus (appearing in a puff of smoke, looking around): Aw, geez, Pop! Not again! How am I going to explain this to Mom?

God (sulkily): My actions do not require explanations. Shall a faultfinder contend with The Almighty? He who argues with God-

Jesus (tiredly): "-let him answer it." Yeah, yeah, I know all about your conversation with Job, Pop. How many millions of times did you tell it to me before I was knee-high to a cross? And how many times do I have to tell you before you get it through that omniscient skull that I know everything you know? Who is the One Who Is Three?

God (even more tiredly than Jesus): Oh Me, not with the damned metaphors again!

Jesus (wanders over to a coffee pot on a table in a corner, picks up a Styrofoam cup and helps himself to some of the beverage): Am I not to you as the face is to the obverse of the coin that is worn with time till no edge remains of it? And is not the Holy Spirit that seamless divide, that edgeless edge, which cleaves us in twain and yet cleaves us one to the other? Lord, let this cup pass away from me.

God: What?

Jesus: This coffee. It’s cold.

God: Enough! I justify Myself to no man! (disappears in a puff of smoke)

Jesus (sighs): I’m not just a man to justify yourself to, Pops. Oh, well. (toeing one of the bodies amidst the carnage) Let’s see what I can do with this mess. Arise. (spirits emerge from the torn and ravaged bodies)

Group Counselor’s Spirit: What happened?

Jesus: Well, my friend, it’s like this. Poppa was a rolling stone. And he rolled all over you and yours.

GCS: I don’t understand.

Jesus: I know. Nobody every did. Probably half my parables sailed by the disciples like a breeze through the lilies of the field. They were the best we had, just never the brightest. (shakes his head) Yes, never the brightest. But having not bright gold to work, mold the dull clay of the Earth.

GCS: What?

Jesus: Never mind. It’s like this: We don’t do miracles anymore, not the flashy kind that you’d need, anyway. If I tried to resurrect you, it wouldn’t work because you wouldn’t buy it -- and neither would anybody else. Even if by some miracle -- heh -- you believed in your own resurrection, you’d be pestered and bothered and hated and feared and ultimately destroyed -- because you would represent something inexplicable. The world’s too sophisticated to accept the inexplicable anymore. The supernatural is unnatural. You’d probably end up on some lab table being dissected while still alive by some myopic technocrat who calls himself a scientist, believes himself a god, and acts a butcher.

GCS: I still don’t understand…

Jesus: Of course you don’t. That’s the point. Look, I miss the miracles, truly I do, but we’re about hearts and minds and souls now, not special effects. The best I can do is have your group come sit by my side, crowned in majesty, in heaven.

GCS: But I’m an atheist!

Jesus (shrugs): Doesn’t matter. You’re all martyrs for a higher purpose, whether you knew the cause or not. It would be graceless of me not to offer heaven as a reward. Look, consider it job security. We can use you and your group. The Lord, He’s got these issues…

GCS: First names only, Jesus. (they disappear in a puff of smoke)