are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English.

Let’s make English Iraq’s official language!

Those aren’t corpses, they’re people experiencing a (temporary) loss of biological function. LBF is a common syndrome, but there’s hope that radioactive dust from depleted uranium rounds might provide a cure via zombie outbreak. No one can deny zombie movies are hip, and re-branding is all about building buzz.
…
How the fuck can we ever hope to get Iraqis not to hate us. Shit, once we’ve left, and they’ve experienced wars new horrors and a new, probably not pleasant, regime arises, then they can deal with having a country covered in nuclear waste.

Also, how is this news? This article might as well be from 69.

For the U.S. military and U.S. officials, understanding the target customer culture is equally critical.

Did someone say… target? Maybe Lileks can help.

Co-inky-dink (that sounds dirty, somehow): Was just channel surfing & saw a M*A*S*H in which Hawkeye said: “New rule: No invading countries where we don’t speak the language,” as he was tending to a Korean civilian who wasn’t communicating to Hawkeye too well.
Three colons in one sentence. Do I win anything? (Insert obligatory Bush colonoscopy joke here.)

Whaaaaaaaaat? You mean the offer of a “free boonie hat” (and the prospect of a free burial) ain’t bringin’ in the fresh blood (and guts)?

In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks…”
Or when they know they’ll get their tongues cut out just before a few holes are drilled in their heads for snitching, because the US &/or Iraqi forces can’t actually provide any security.
The whole advertising, marketing, branding thing is repugnant enough in for-profit activities, but to attempt to apply it to fucking warfare/occupation is beyond ridiculous, like the “schools should be run like a business” deal.
Maybe I’ll wander over to the RAND Corporation & get as much of our $400,000.00 back as I can through vandalism.

About Bush’s colonoscopy:

What are they looking for? His head?

Did they find it? Or is it just shoved up there too far?

Oh, fuck. Why don’t they just put up posters, depicting American soldiers smiling down at Iraqi kids, with the words, “The Visitors Are Our Friends”?

“In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces.”

But, when the reward for so doing is to have the remaining enemy infiltrators grab the civilians in the middle of the night and drill holes in their heads, the civilians will be less likely to help. Re-branding just doesn’t help when the brand was always at least a few hundred thousand field reps short of successful product support.

‘They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English.’

So THAT’S why my immigrant neighbors asked me to stop volunteering on the local welcoming committee! My brand i.d. was harmed by my too-literal interpretation of the “horseshoes and hand grenades” cliche at our picnics.

“Wal-Mart’s desired identity as a friendly shop where working-class customers can feel comfortable and find good value, for example, would be undercut if telephone operators and sales personnel had rude attitudes, or if the stores offered too much high-end merchandise.”

Considering the amount of “collateral damage” Wal-Mart does to the communities in which it operates, that company’s enduring success would seem to hold a valuable lesson for any occupying army. Then again, if sales personnel had the habit of shooting mortars at your car while you shopped, even Wal-Mart might have a few ‘issues’. It’s hard to say; give me the better part of half a million dollars, and I’ll slap together a few simple concepts for you. Toss in another hundred grand, and I’ll include a PowerPoint with the written report.

Oh holy mother of crap. I took a marketing class in High School. I could have fucking told them that for metro fair, and a ham sandwich with a coke.

New Coke didn’t fail because it had bad marketing, it failed because no one liked the product.

And when in the FUCK did Iraq turn into a brand demographic market share?

This is just… mind bending. It’s like they think that the Sunni’s are driven to violence because the Shiites have a crappy mascot character. The Golden Dome is NOT the Al Qaeda version of the Golden Arches.

Goddamn. I”m going back to watching MST3k. But I’ll be VERY GRUMPY about it.

I’m glad y’all paid $400,000 for this super-useful “study.”

To be accurate, *we* paid for it, since the vile scum that thought the clusterfuck in Iraq –and the other actions that have left a trail of misery we’ve left around the world since the US decided that being an international player was good enough reason to invade the Philippines at the turn of the century– were good ideas are employed at we, the taxpayers, leisure.

It’s interesting though. After seven years of ShrubCo., my internal outrage meter has been totally crocked for ages; it became impossible to differentiate between reactions that veered “That sucks” and “Those people are evil swine that should be disembowled, stat” after reading the constant stream of horror stories; all perspective was lost. I think I felt a slight twitch, however, after reading the stuff Brad “Tee hee the Red Sox are totally fucked, an epic choke job is on tap”* Rocket put in the lovely blue boxes.

* Not a Yankees fan or a fan of a team even east of the Rockies.

Orwellian? Inhuman? Deluded? Sure, its all those things, but before you toss that report to the Roomba of History, consider what politics in America has become.

Half the reason we’re in the shit we’re in is because the GOP started down this road– Madison Ave. geegaw to “sell” policies and candidates– then discovered that is just easier to work on the “core brand” and find people who can pitch it convincingly to “the consumer”. Fast forward 20 years and you predictably have what they have now: a world class PR machine that’s totally divorced from the substance of governing.

Every problem is a PR problem. How something “plays” is more important than what it is. Scientific data don’t fit the message? Bury them, and apply “negative branding” to anyone who says different. Half a city drowns due to poor planning and willful neglect? Someone get a blue spot on that castle and send in the Spokesmodel-In-Chief to do damage control (oh, and make sure he rolls up his sleeves so it looks like he did something). Company-sponsored war going to shit? Just slap a new slogan on the same thing we’ve been doing and make sure everyone says the words “new strategy” at least three times whenever the cameras are on.

And now they want to learn how to put a positive brand on war and death. Why not, its just the kind of “tough sell” that will draw the best and the brightest. What could possibly go wrong?

Hoosier X: About Bush’s colonoscopy: What are they looking for? His head?

Multiple choice:
a) His head
b) His next justification for keeping troops in Iraq.
c) Cheney’s wristwatch.

Goddamn. I”m going back to watching MST3k. But I’ll be VERY GRUMPY about it.

“Bitter? Oh, A TAD.”

And I agree with Hawkeye Pierce – if we’re going to invade a country, minimal fluency in the language is the LEAST we can expect I don’t know how well trained our troops are in Arabic, but A) given the quality of the training we provide for grunts these days and B) America’s love of foreign languages in general, I’d have to guess NOT MUCH.

Of course, given the “Hawkeye Principle” and B) combined, we’re pretty much restricted to invading Britain, Australia, Hong Kong and non-Quebecois Canada.

I mean, you can’t sell people shit sandwiches just by putting them in pretty packaging. Instead you have to, you know, make them not be shit sandwiches.

I respectfully disagree.

Hello, could the image-tools savvy please tell us what is going on with the image accompanying the WaPo article? The photo of Bush and his hand gestures, perhaps taken from the Rand report itself, seems to be a double exposure. In fact across the front of his coat is a kind of faded image of what looks like a saxophone. I don’t have all those Photoshopping thangs on my computer so I thought I would throw this out to the world. What gives? Or am I imagining things?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/07/21/GR2007072100159.html

Isn’t that pretty much Bush admininistration modus operandi? Come up with horrbile policy and then try to sell it to the “customers.” This is what Karen Hughes’ new job is all about: not changing our diplomatic goals (i.e. invading other countries), but trying to market it to the rest of the world so they think it’s a good thing. It doesn’t look like she’s been doing a very good job. Either that or the rest of the world isn’t as dumb as they think they are.

Hey’ I’d have done it for one-tenth of the price. Rather similar to the Iraqis who would have done various bits of bridge-rebuilding for one-tenth the price who got beat out by Halliburton et al.

But they’ve already done this marketing thayng: I remember reading about it in Riverbend, early in the occupation, second half of 2003. She was saying the US had been putting up billboards with sparkling images of desert oases emblazoned with the words “Baghdad is getting better and better!”

The reason she remarked upon this was that, firstly, Baghdad was in ruins, and secondly, Iraqis had had a couple of decades of Saddam Hussein and his propaganda, so they were viewing this new “PR burst” with a decidedly jaundiced eye. **

I suspect that the silly juggins who came up with the idea (I’m thinking Karen Something, but can’t quite remember. Anyway, some Bushie acolyte from Mad Ave) was too thrilled by their own cleverness to actually consider what Iraqis might think of it. I suspect that all through the course of this debacle, in fact, none of the “planners” have actually thought about Iraqis, as real people. As targets of weapons and various forms of psychological manipulation, yes, but not people, who might behave unpredictably.

I know they didn’t take Iraqis into account a couple of weeks ago when they were all trumpeting that, yes, I think we will be in Iraq for 50 years or so. At least, none of them actually spoke to any Iraqis about it.

**Yes, a jaundiced eye. Just the one: they passed it around and dusted it off occasionally.

Pere Ubu: Hey, matey, keep your big paws off our country, y’hear? All we got here’s a lot of desert wrapped in a bit of frilly coastline. If you like flat brown, well, it’s paradise, but if it’s all the same to you we’d rather not be invaded, thank you very much.

Love and kisses,
Australia

I would have done that marketing study for $800,000. Doing the job for twice as much money shows that I’m a real go getter. I take risks and have confidence. I could even alter the study to show that the Bush admin’s policies are working splendidly. I’m just that good.

Pere Ubu: Hey, matey, keep your big paws off our country, y’hear?

Well, then again, we really don’t speak the same language to begin with 😉 so you and Britain are off the list…

Isn’t it somehow, you know, pitiful, that English is so common as a second language in the rest of the world while we have a problem with only one (witness our Glorious Leader). It’s scary that, under the Hawkeye Principle, any other given country in the world (except maybe North Korea) would be entitled to invade US.

They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks

On the plus side, people who are collateral damage have a difficult time speaking ill of the brand that killed them. Their families and friends, however, are a separate issue, one that merits a study of its own.

If changing Iraqi consumers’ perception of the U.S. military brand proves too steep a challenge, I’m sure the Rand Corporation would gladly accept another $400,000 to carry out another study, this one on how to convince the Iraqis to reconceptualize themselves.

We could emphasize the “carpet” aspect of “carpet bombing” a lot more than the “bombing” part.

Everyone likes new carpet.

J, I especially like the surveys of Iraqi public opinion (“Are you better off today compared with five years ago?”) — which I assume means the opinions of those Iraqis who work in the fortified Green Zone (it being too dangerous to interact elsewhere) — that ignore the half-million or so Iraqis who’ve been killed.

Didn’t Karen Hughes take a quick first-class tour of friendly Arab capitals, get an earful about what’s going on outside the friendly confines of Faux News, and realize how utterly futile it is to put lipstick on the Bush-Cheney pig? I haven’t heard a word about what she’s been doing since that first whirlwind tour.

Finally, if Volvo means “safety” and iPod means “cool”, doesn’t the U.S. military in Iraq mean this: [insert sickening photo of killed and mutilated Arabs]?

Guys, this is how we’ve ALWAYS done it. What is different now is only that our marketing is more sophisticated.

Anyone else here old enough to remember TV commercials from the ’70s? Maybe some of you out there old enough to remember ’em from the ’60s can back me up on this. If you don’t remember, you could spend some time here. Commercials used to be stupid, maudlin, hamfisted shoving of a product in your face with cheesy visuals and bad music. Think Ginsu knives. This is just what Winning Their Hearts And Minds looks like when Madison avenue gets computers to crunch their statistical data from focus groups (instead of doing it by hand like they used to) and has fMRIs to monitor your brain waves while you watch their advertising.

We’ve even always elected Presidents this way. Well, at least since Thomas Jefferson. Bush isn’t the first president we’ve elected just because we’d like to have a beer with him…..someone help me out here: was it William Harrison who had mock log cabins erected at his campaign stops so he could run as “regular guy”? Who, when a critical newspaper editorial said that if you gave him a military pension he’d spend the rest of his days sitting in front of his cabin drinking corn whiskey, turned that into his whole campaign?

I’m not saying it’s not evil – it is, in fact, the definition of evil. But it’s not new. Or, perhaps to steal a turn of phrase from the admen themselves, it’s actually “New!! Improved!!”.

I mean, you can’t sell people shit sandwiches just by putting them in pretty packaging.

You don’t eat at McDonald’s very much, do you?

Wal-Mart’s desired identity as a friendly shop where working-class customers can feel comfortable and find good value, for example, would be undercut if telephone operators and sales personnel had rude attitudes, or if the stores offered too much high-end merchandise.

Really. Wal-Mart is the best example you can come up with here? Are you sure this isn’t just really well-camouflaged satire? Rude telephone operators!? I’ve never HEARD of such a thing!

For Iraqis, at times it must seem to them like that scene in “Mars Attacks” where the Martians are playing messages on their loudspeakers like “Don’t run, we’re your friends!” while zapping away with their guns.

They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English

They paid for a study to come up with this? Shit, I could have knocked that one off in an afternoon and still had time to hang out in the Rand cafeteria.

The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a new identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus

Obviously, a grad from the Leo Strauss School of Warfare and Politics.

This beyond teh stupid. This is eht surreal. This is out of Catch-22. “Hm. How can we make bombing and invading a country seem *to them* like they’re customers going to Wal-Mart?”

I immediately intuit that I will have to slam my head at least twelve (12) times against a wall, desk, or other hard surface, before I can adequately grasp this phenomenon.

Maybe they should just de-emphasize this demographic and try to win a new customer base, one that’s right next door to the current marketing campaign. The promotional materials would only need slight modification: change the “q” to an “n” and you’re done. These people would probably just love new carpet.

It’s just so horribly easy to think/speak/write in this mode. I must now find something blunt with which to bash this out of my mind.

Several years back, in the early days of edupreneurship, some go-getter type came to the college where I work to propose a new program, something completely nonsensical, like a pre-professional degree in grocery bagging. He came to a meeting of the curriculum committee armed with a big flow chart on which every box eventually arrived at “Yes!” Any “no” response was immediately re-routed through one of various rebranding channels until the only option left was to buy the product. We kicked this grinning idiot out on his ass, but then again, he didn’t have artillery.

WCW: That’s probably a reflection in the bulletproof glass Bush has to hide behind. The saxaphone might be from the UT band, which would explain the “Hook ’em Horns” gesture.
Don’t forget New Zealand & much of the Caribbean, on the “where we can invade” list. Islands are nice. And the Iranians don’t need new carpeting, their Persian rugs do just fine, thank you.

YYEEEEEAAAARRGGHHKKK

I can’t begin to wrap my mind around everything that’s wrong with this morally brain-dead study and the inept morons who shelled out taxpayer money for it. This is a cruel fucking joke, and speaking of branding, they better hope no English-speaking Iraqis frequent the MSNBC webpage during the 2 hours a day that they have electricity. Not that they need any confirmation of the patently obvious fact that the US military considers them a bunch of subhuman cattle whose suffering is no more important than vacuum cleaner sales at fucking Wal-Mart.

Wow. Lends a whole new meaning to “targeted demographic”, doesn’t it?

Look. You sell toothpaste by trying to convince consumers that your toothpaste is better/tastier/more effective/a better value than the other guy’s toothpaste. He in turn goes to the Marketing pros to try to convince the same consumers of just the opposite thing. This is an effective way to increase share and revenues.

Now, think about it. None of this actually applies when the product you are selling is death and destruction. You can call it flowers and candy, but people can look out their windows and see you killing people, threatening people, detaining people and wrecking people’s shit.

Marketing is in fact based on the theory that people are stupid and will follow emotional cues like sheep, but this is the Reductio ad absurdum of marketing. You cannot go here and say this is the logical conclusion of MarCom. People are not so stupid that you can kill members of their family and terrorize their neighborhood and successfully convince them that this is a good thing.

mikey

This is out of Catch-22.

What’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country!

All we got here’s a lot of desert wrapped in a bit of frilly coastline

Hey, that’s right up our alley!

I downloaded the Rand report (pdf) and have been skimming through it today. I wanted to share this bit with everyone. It’s from a subsection called “Use Blogs to Harness the Influencing Power of Everyday People” (pp. 110-111).

The United States should use this tool [blogs] not to create fake and deceitful voices of support, but rather to tap broader segments of an otherwise quiet society. Business blogging practices provide a unique blueprint for action. Consider the potential power of a blog written by an indigenous soldier who fights alongside U.S. soldiers and marines. The soldier writes of his exploits fighting insurgents. Interspersed are discussions of a wife he dearly misses, off time with comrades, and associations with U.S. colleagues. He is no lackey of the coalition or his superiors. He occasionally criticizes his government, the army, and the coalition, but these criticisms serve only to enhance his credibility. Not unlike the blogs written by U.S. personnel and eagerly consumed by the U.S. public, these dispatches from the front could make for popular reading.

We recommend that U.S. forces empower indigenous soldiers, government employees, and others with blogging tools that enable them to convincingly voice their messages to large sectors of the population. Like employee blogs, they require autonomy and freedom to spread their messages independent of the coalition and governing authorities. Guidelines should be established and monitored for compliance to prevent misuse and lapses in operational security. A selection process could be instituted to assist in ensuring that bloggers write with requisite ability. Of course, adequate Internet penetration in the host environment is a must for success and should be evaluated prior to program initiation.

So if a blog purportedly authored by an indigenous Iraqi soldier pops up, gets a lot of play from the wingnuts, and tends to have posts that start with “The fact is,” we’ll know Gary has found a new job.

Coming this fall on Iraq TV…

Blogging in Baghdad.

There have already been plenty of regular people blogging from Baghdad. The problem is that first they tell the truth, then they leave before they get blown up.

Reading this is like listening to a Monty Python sketch. Except real people are dying.

Could the “indigenous Iraqi blog” be modeled on SN! ? Is there a fundie Muslim equivalent to Pastor Swank? Can we get “Shorter Moqtada Sadr” posts?!? I’m starting to get tingly!

this is the Reductio ad absurdum of marketing.

Excellent way of putting it.

Evidently the people at Rand have never heard of Astroturfing.

These people would probably just love new carpet.

Now, see this would be just perfect. Only the US Government would think they could sell carpets to Persia.

But they would be crappy polyester carpets made in China by convict labor…

mikey

I’m thinking what they really need is viral marketing. No, not the kind where they have hot girls in bars, talking about “Hey, I got this really great war. Yeah, it’s called Iraq, and you can get this Iran accessory pack. It’s so cute!” I’m talking actual viruses.

The pacification of an occupied country, considered as product rebranding.
Didn’t Alfred Jarry write that already?

“At the end of the day, nobody likes having their country invaded, even it’s by giant bunnies”

As the Australians can readily attest ….

empower indigenous soldiers, government employees, and others with blogging tools… they require autonomy and freedom to spread their messages… Guidelines should be established and monitored for compliance

This think-tank bullshit has to be dead-pan satire.
The style seems familiar from somewhere… If you ask me, Todd C. Helmus et al. were reading Report from Iron Mountain before they scribbled out their 211 pages and wrote out their bill for $400000.
The process might also have involved a few bong hits and a great deal of hysterical giggling.

this is the Reductio ad absurdum of marketing.
More a Reductio ad bibendum.

Have to disagree you with you about something– if you couldn’t sell people shit sandwiches, how did we end up with G.W. Bush?

The contradictions continue in the next paragraph, Herr Doktor.

It is worth noting that businesses strive to control their messages. They create well-crafted positioning statements and do all within their power to properly synchronize corporate actions and messages. Influencers present a challenge to these best-laid plans, as they are not beholden to corporate message platforms. They will find their own product attributes to praise, and they may advocate product uses unanticipated by corporate executives. Businesses have learned through the years to not fight these efforts and to let go of control of the message. The United States will have to take a similar approach, allowing social nodes and everyday influencers to reach their own conclusions and find their own voices.

Immediately after comes a new subsection, “Open Internet Access to Indigenous Populations.” It opens with words of caution:

The previous discussion of blogging brings to mind another key question. Should the United States foster greater Internet use in areas where they conduct stability-and-support operations? It is not an easily answered question, given the degree to which the United States’ adversaries have thus far dominated the medium. Expansion of indigenous Internet use runs the risk of enhancing enemy IO [information operations] capabilities.

No lie, I finished a book wherein one of the policy recommendations was for the US military to control the US media, thus really marring a good read. The guy, John Clippinger, has some insights into the human identity, but I think he’s spent way too much time in military think tanks.
This report sounds like the authors read the same book.

Honestly, they’d have more luck marketing the alien anal probe: at least then they’d get the recreational market.

If they want to go edgy, they should try those flashing Moonenite throwies, like in Boston.

Those were cool.

The most successful companies, the Rand study notes, are those that study their clientele and shape their workplace and product in ways incorporate their brand into every interaction with consumers.

The scariest thing is that these wankers see the defence forces as a business…… that’s just reeeeally fucked up.

[Y]ou can’t sell people shit sandwiches just by putting them in pretty packaging. Instead you have to, you know, make them not be shit sandwiches.

Brad, son, you don’t understand the modern meaning of the term “marketing”. Unlike “advertising”, which assumes that people want the product you have produced, “marketing” assumes that you have a product which people must be convinced they need. This is why the most-referenced products in marketing texts tend to be crap like McDonalds burgers or Wal-Marts — stuff nobody would choose if there were better alternatives available. Marketing, as a discipline (or priesthood), consists largely of finding ways to disguise the brutal fact that you’re selling shit sandwiches to people who have no choice but to buy them. Thus the Wal-Mart quote about how “high-end products” would only “drive target customers away”, which sounds so much nicer than “We want to sell the cheapest possible crap in large volume, so we force all competitors out of business and make it impossible for our customers-cum-employees to either find or afford better alternatives”. Not to mention the popularity of the “marketing” meme among Republicans and Repub-wannabes — they don’t want candidates chosen by Teh People, they want Teh People to be driven/bamboozled/conned into “choosing” the candidates that Repubs decide to offer… a mindset that leads invariably to such marketing “successes” as McKinley, Harding, or GWB.

The Rand people are not stupid, or crazy; they’re just aiming at a rather different market than the “Iraqi people” whose needs they take in vain. The U.S. Joint Forces Command could not possibly care less about “shaping responses” among the people on the wrong side of the Green Zone perimeter. All the ten-dollar psychology and weasel words in Rand’s report are actually meant to convince American voters, or some subset of those voters, that Operation Enduring FUBAR is something other than a money sink, an ongoing disaster, an international stain on America’s reputation. It’s not about selling those shit sandwiches to Iraqis — it’s about convincing Americans that shit has a well-established history as a luncheon comestible in Iraq, and incidentally that the USJFC shit sandwiches are made from the very highest quality of name-brand all-American shit, which only terrorists or crazy people would reject as a wholesome food product.

They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Jesus Christ, let me fix that:

Dogs are less likely to bark, the study says, when they have a mouthful of food.

No, no, no, not yet.

It is less likely to be light outside, the study says, when the sun has already set.

Getting there…

Markets are less likely to understand humanity, the study says, even though they might pretend to.

There, I think that conveys my thoughts more clearly.

D’oh, that last line above should read “Marketers are less likely…”

So the more I read of this report, the more it reads like something that The Yes Men might have dreamed up. The recipients of an invasion as “consumers”… oh dear. Please, someone, tell me that Helmus, Paul and Glenn were taking the piss.
Come to think of it, the Yes Men did explain how to sell shit sandwiches.

What makes me a socialist is not that I agree with Anne Laurie.

What makes me a socialist is my belief that capitalism has never been about selling people products, and always been about selling people new “needs”.

The only thing different nowadays is that we’re much better at it.

selling people new “needs”.

New, crystal clear! New berry flavor! New easy-to-swallow caplets! New look, same great taste!

Diced tomatoes! Petite diced tomatoes! Petite low-sodium diced tomatoes! Petite low sodium diced tomatoes with basil and garlic flavor!

Deodorant – my way! A shampoo just for my color hair! A car that says who I am! A diet cola for my lifestyle!

It’s the festishism of individual choice. We’re being sold on the fact that our individual Uniqueness demands we choose products that make personal statements for us, and that our choice of new berry flavored kaopectate or Just For Brunettes shampoo mean we’re specially discerning consumers whose hair or ailimentary tracts aren’t like everybody else’s.

Nobody likes foreign troops in their country. Even wingnuts would hate French troops in Kansas for example. However, if they were rebranded as “super happy fun liberal-hatin’ Reagon cowboys” it just might work.

I think RAND is on to something. Of course, this assumes that the average Iraqi is as dumb as the average wingnut.

It’s the festishism of individual choice. We’re being sold on the fact that our individual Uniqueness demands we choose products that make personal statements for us, and that our choice of new berry flavored kaopectate or Just For Brunettes shampoo mean we’re specially discerning consumers whose hair or ailimentary tracts aren’t like everybody else’s.

Indeed….it also allows people to tell us that we are, in fact, freer than ever before, because we now have sooooo much more freedom to choose. And isn’t that what freedom really is?

If someone in his neighborhood would piss on Milton Friedman’s grave for me, I’d be oh so appreciative.

Ok, now, waitaminute. Now I know I’m usually as cynical as anyone, but this is getting a little crazy. You don’t need to be suffering from American Exceptionalism to say something nice about where you live.

I would point out that in real totalitarian states, people who say the kinds of things any and all of us regularly say on this board, just in idle conversation, get put in prison. We have problems and if we aren’t very skilled and very lucky, we could end up with a nation like that. But take a minute and recognize what was gifted to you that these thugs in power have not yet been able to take away.

If nothing else, maybe we’ll all fight a little harder…

mikey

Google “Iraq puppy” – Now, *there’s* marketing, for you!

Heard an NPR story about a professor who was investigating what the media in general was offering as a message. He went down to his local cable provider and got the videotapes for 24 continuous hours of each of the 100 channels offered by the cable company. Then he popped the Mother of All Jiffy-Pop Popcorn buckets, sat down, and watched. And watched. And watched some more, until he was done.

The result? As g points out above: The consistent message that you, dear viewer, are special and unique and that the world is your fucking oyster, so go on out there and spend spend spend to celebrate your uniqueness. Off to the mall! Wait, don’t forget your wallet! Here, take some of these checks too. And you got this credit card offer in the mail yesterday, you can fill it out in the food court while you eat your unique S’Barro meal (Bologna Alfredo, anyone?), and drop it off at Mailboxes US-of-fucking-A. Go team!

The problem seems to parse like this: It’s American Exceptionalism all right, but it’s not [Exceptionalism of a place called America], it’s [Exceptionalism of people who call themselves Americans].

Shorter Douche Baggins: It’s not the dirt, it’s the dorks.

No shit. You get a cookie….

mikey

“I mean, you can’t sell people shit sandwiches just by putting them in pretty packaging. Instead you have to, you know, make them not be shit sandwiches.”

Actually, you can. Look at baby formula — the manufacturers are required by law (in this country, anyway) to state that their product is inferior to the (free) product they’re competing against, and they’ve still managed to capture a large percentage of the market.

[…] * Hew Hughitt thinks that trying to end the war will hurt Democrats, you know, because he cares about helping us out politically. But maybe the horrible war is, you know, just branded wrong. […]