Tag Archives: marketing

Generation Gap

You call yourselves Creatives,
seekers of some brave new world
where the light of tomorrow shines
and everyone is free,
constructing some great paradigm
connecting one and all
across the universe and time
through some technology.

You call yourselves Inventors,
sculpting from the gossamer
of heretofore undreamt of dreams
and other precious stuff –
iconoclasts, revisioning
the way the world should be:
unleashed from simple here and now
across eternity.

You build as if your raw supplies
were part of nothing else:
a world of waste and sloth and darkness
waiting for your touch.
Pretending it some virgin spot
you dig with pre made tools,
imagining your destiny
replaces nothing much.

And those with whom you disagree?
It’s obvious they’re old,
and harbor shadows of the past,
their light hurtful and cold.
If their ideas made sense,
why did the world end up this way?
That they failed, is no fault of yours;
they did what they were told.

And those who straddle old and new,
those hopeless dinosaurs
whose shoulders you now stand upon
without a word of thanks?
You graciously allow them space
to try and tag along,
while you refuse suggestion
as you scurry to the bank.

Creative? Without toil and sweat,
your art is fantasy;
a game of smoke and mirrors
where you hide your snob’s distain
for those who came before you,
whose creations you transform
into the shiny, plastic things
you promise will again

invoke some metamorphosis,
turn all frogs into kings,
relieve your halitosis
and give back your bounce and spring,
improve your sense of wonder
for a reasonable cost,
and make you feel you’re where it’s at
pretending you’re not lost.

30 SEP 2014

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The Smile That Sells

The smile that sells the message never writes it.
The sweat under the spotlights is for show.
The work it takes to make it all look easy
few understand, and most will never know.

The pain endured to make an hour’s pleasure,
the loss a pittance gained cannot recoup:
how little it seems worth to just continue.
How low is it required that one must stoop?

The easy laugh – how hard it is to fake it:
to hold the sorrow back, year after year.
The work is not enough; nothing can make it
seem less a torture and more a career.

12 APR 2013

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Wrongful Thinking Department 101

Quote from a currently running commercial for Cox Digital Telephone:
“If a million people are doing it, it must be a good thing, right?”

So, if a million people are jumping off of cliffs, to use a metaphor from my mother’s playbook when I was a kid, you should be doing it too?

Or to paint with a much broader brush … if a million people are racist, sexist, bigoted, uptight, boorish cads, then that’s the direction you want to head in? If a million people support a fascist dictator with an agenda that includes decimation of people not like him (or them), that makes it a worthy cause?

Wow. Marketing never ceases to amaze me.

To paraphrase Ibsen, since when has the majority ever managed to do anything but ostracize (and that’s the mild end of the reactive spectrum — the other end would include thumbscrews and quartering or crucifying) its innovators?

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The Press Conference: descort

No outrage, just amused
(perhaps its because I can’t stand the sound
of his voice)
It reminds me of a song by Robyn Hitchcock
“He’s the president of Europe and he’s talking to the dead /
They’re the only ones who’ll listen or believe a word he’s said”
That, and Wenn ich Kultur hore
entsichere ich meinen Browning
*
runs through my head as he testifies
(as in testifying about his faith, under oath
only to his God)
There ought to be a law against running the country
without a mandate to do so
(like say, the popular vote).

13 APR 2004

* Hanns Johst, a German playwright of the Nazi era, wrote “Wenn ich Kultur hore… entsichere ich meinen Browning” (When I hear the word “Culture”, I reach for my Browning (rifle)).

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