“We’ll retain huge leverage — the leverage that comes from cutting into their oil sales. No good negotiator is going to give that up, and Barack Obama and John Kerry are smart negotiators. But it’s in the American national interest to try to make this negotiation work. If it’s not in the Israeli interest or the Saudi interest, so be it,” – Nicholas Burns, the former under secretary of state for policy behind the Iran sanctions during the Bush administration.
So. Be. It.
A quarter-century after the release of Cannibal Tours, Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary about global tourism, Rolf Potts draws a few recent parallels:
Though Cannibal Tours was never meant to be taken as comedy, its more memorable scenes have a cringe-inducing quality that calls to mind the delicious discomfort of watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office. In basic narrative terms, the documentary depicts a meandering series of interactions between luxury liner tourists and the Papuans who live in various Sepik River villages. What the film lacks in plot arc, however, it makes up for in awkward tension as it probes the mutual suspicion and misunderstanding that arises when wealthy outsiders visit once-primitive communities in a far-flung corner of the world.
Potts describes the movie’s “most iconic moment” (seen above):
As the sweaty white folks wander around snapping photos and haggling for souvenirs, a handsome young Papuan tribesman speaks to an offscreen interviewer, earnestly explaining what he thinks of the outsiders. “When the tourists come to our village, we are friendly towards them,” he says, his words translated in the subtitles. “They like to see all the things in the village. We accept them here.” While he’s saying this, an elderly German woman wearing high-hitched khaki trousers and silver horn-rimmed spectacles creeps into the background, fumbles with the settings on her camera, and — oblivious to what the tribesman is saying — snaps a picture of him before scuttling back out of the frame. Upon initial viewing, this interaction seems to perfectly encapsulate the strained guest-host dynamic portrayed in Cannibal Tours: even as the Sepik native takes pains to affirm the humanity of tourists, the tourist’s first instinct is to treat him like scenery.
Watch the full documentary here, if you must.
Prospero’s R.L.G. isn’t worrying about technology’s transformation of common parlance:
When words and phrases mutate, they do so in order to fill some niche that needs filling. Often, that change involves taking a formerly powerful word or phrase (“awesome“, “oh my god”, “what the fuck”) and turning it into a wry comment (“If you could stop tapping your foot, that would be awesome”; “My boss was in a weird mood all morning and I was like WTF?” “OMG this cheesecake is amazing.”) This is why people actually speak “OMG” and “LOL” out loud, though they are no shorter than the phrases they replace. (“WTF” takes even longer to say than “what the fuck”.) As organisms adapt to ecological niches, so do new bits of language.
What are the long-term effects of all this?
We might see language littered with ever more phrases born of keyboard brevity. Another intriguing possibility involves the rise and spread of speech-to-text technology. One quirk of these systems is that they require speakers to enunciate punctuation and other typographical manoeuvres. (Eg: “Are you coming tonight question mark;New paragraph on another point, I’d like to mention that…”) As speech recognition software improves, we might go from language designed for a tiny keyboards entering our speech (people speaking “OMG” out loud), to language designed for speech recognition software entering our speech (people speaking “new paragraph” out loud to signal a change in topic). Such spoken punctuation would probably find the same special niche function as “WTF” and “LOL” have today. “Wow, I can’t wait to read your screenplay exclamation point” would mean something quite different from “Wow, I can’t wait to read your screenplay!”—namely, semi-ironic detachment.
Adam Corner traces how advertizing agencies co-opted anti-consumerism and irony to create more effective copy. He writes, “It seems almost quaint, now that popular culture is riddled with knowing, self-referential nods to itself, but the aim of advertising used to be straightforward: to associate a product in a literal and direct way with positive images of a desirable, aspirational life”:
Genre-subverting ads started to emerge as early as 1959, when the Volkswagen Beetle’s US ‘Think Small’ campaign began poking fun at the German car’s size and idiosyncratic design. In stark contrast to traditional US car adverts, whose brightly coloured depictions of gargantuan front ends left the viewer in no doubt that bigger was better, the Beetle posters left most of the page blank, a tiny image of the car itself tucked away in a corner. These designs spoke to a generation that was becoming aware of how the media and advertising industries worked. The American journalist Vance Packard had blown the whistle on the tricks of the advertising trade in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and younger consumers increasingly saw themselves as savvy. Selling to this demographic required not overeager direct pitches, but insouciant ‘cool’, laced with irony.
In subsequent decades, self-aware adverts became the norm, and advertising began to satirise the very concept of itself.
In 1996, Sprite launched a successful campaign with the slogan ‘Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst’. In 2010, Kotex sent up the bizarre conventions of 1980s tampon adverts (happy, dancing women, jars of blue liquid being spilt) by flashing up the question ‘Why are Tampon adverts so ridiculous?’ before displaying its latest range of sanitary products.
‘Companies try to convince you that they are part of your family,’ says Tim Kasser, professor of psychology and an expert on consumer culture at Knox College in Illinois. ‘They want to create a sense of connection or even intimacy between the viewer and the advertiser. An ad that says: “Yes, I know you know that I’m an ad, and I know that you know that I’m annoying you” is a statement of empathy, and thus a statement of connection. And as any salesperson will tell you, connection is key to the sales.’
Copyranter, from his new perch at Vice, recently examined this phenomenon on a more meta level:
The purpose of an advertising agency’s existence is to advertise things. You would think, then, that they would be great at advertising their own services. That is not the case. In fact, ad agencies, even the so-called “creative” ones, are nearly, universally terrible at it. Not just not good—terrible. They do things like create insipid videos that make you wonder why the place is still in business, or create ads that are pathetically derivative or pointless or laughable or worse—look like they were created by a 10-year-old boy. But, if you really want to show potential clients how edgy you are, you make your employees pose nude in space helmets, and without a whiff of irony call it “The Creative Influence.”
The above ads and ideas were all hatched by big or “hot” shops. Which is just sad. However, there is one agency that seems to have at least a clue: john st. in Toronto. For several years now, john st. has released videos that perfectly mock a current advertising trend. Mocking advertising trends is like bashing a dead horse in the face. But doing it memorably and originally and as an insider is another thing.
The latest example from john st.:
Previous Dish on various advertising strategies here, here, and here.
(Image: An ad for South African newspaper The Cape Times, part of a series turning iconic photos into selfies, via Laughing Squid)
It happened with Australia’s Medibank program:
What [are] the lessons that Americans and supporters of Obamacare can learn from Australia’s experience? The most obvious is that no piece is legislation is permanent, but must be sustained politically. If it is passed over the opposition of a rival party, and if that party comes into power, it can always repeal it or simply make it impossible to implement. The only way to ensure that the legislation will survive a change in the party in power is if the legislation becomes thoroughly popular. If it can’t be fully implemented—which is what happened to the original Medibank legislation—it will be vulnerable to a challenge.
From all appearances, the Obama administration seemed to believe that the mere act of getting the Affordable Care Act through Congress would ensure its survival and popularity. But now it faces the very real possibility that the Republicans, campaigning on the failure of Obamacare and flagging recovery, would win back the Senate in 2014, and be in a position to force the administration to accept changes in the Affordable Care Act that will weaken the program. Obama has already embraced modifications to the act—allowing insurance companies to bypass the exchanges and their regulations—that will hurt it. And if Republicans were to win the White House and Congress in 2016, they could simply repeal the Affordable Care Act.
James Capretta, one of Obamacare’s strongest critics, wants the GOP to keep gunning for the individual mandate:
Obamacare’s most vulnerable provision remains the mandate. It’s already very weak, and yet the law’s supporters are counting on it to salvage the faltering program. The assumption is that, eventually, many millions of people will sign up for insurance in the Obamacare exchanges because they will have no other choice. But it is also clear that, if pressed, Democrats can no longer defend the mandate based on what has transpired over the past two months. The enrollment process simply does not work, and, even if it did, millions of middle-class Americans will find the plans being offered on the exchanges far too expensive for them to purchase. Americans don’t trust Obamacare. Forcing them into this program is a non-starter politically.
That’s why, in early December, the GOP should again press the case for a one-year delay of the mandate tax. It will be a win-win proposition. At that point, the website may be limping along, but it will still not be fully functional. Democratic support for compelling people into this dysfunctional system will be faltering. If Democrats continue to resist a delay anyway, the GOP will have an issue that could become the focus of the entire 2014 midterm election. And if Democrats agree to the delay, it will be one more step toward undoing the damage of Obamacare.
Tuan C. Nguyen rounds up commentary about “Multi-View,” a feature on Samsung’s new OLED TV set that allows two people to watch different shows simultaneously:
Techlicious blogger Dan O’Halloran raved about the technology, praising the display’s picture quality as “impressive” and describing the imagery as “sharp and clear, the colors vibrant, and blacks deep.” Consumer Reports, however, points out that one of the major drawbacks with watching television in this mode is that you can’t adjust the picture quality. ”We couldn’t optimize the picture and found it to be over-sharpened,” notes the writer. Another criticism was that “resolution was visibly reduced when watching a 3D movie in the Multiview mode.”
Of course, it still all boils down to how actual couples take to the idea after an evening spent divvying up their screen. Reviewing the S9C for the Daily Mail, writer Ben Hatch and his wife Dinah had the kind of experience that made for a predictable story line. At first, “it is utterly blissful. I could enjoy watching TV with my beloved wife without having to watch any of her unbeloved dross,” he writes. She concurred, revealing that “At first, both of us revelled in our new-found TV independence. I looked over at Ben on the sofa, his face deadly serious as he absorbed the horrors of World War II, and felt pleased we had avoided the usual channel wrangle,” she writes.
But while their initial impressions were positive, Ben admitted to feeling “lonely” and Dinah, being wary of welcoming something so disruptive into their home, ultimately gave the feature a thumbs down. “Overall, this experience is not great for our relationship,” she concludes. “I noticed that Ben and I were sitting further apart on the sofa than normal.”
In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC, cautioned: “If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post antibiotic era. And, in fact, for some patients and some microbes, we are already there.” Maryn McKenna considers what losing the effectiveness of antibiotics would mean:
The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.
We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it.
Graham Robb reviews Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes, a chronicle of the aeronauts who ventured into the skies in hot air balloons during the 18th and 19th centuries:
For some time, the practical advantages of the balloon seemed to be primarily military.Tethered balloons were used by Napoleon, and, later, in the American Civil War, as observation platforms. Apart from providing strategic intelligence—and a very obvious target for the enemy’s muskets—the “spy in the sky” was a formidable psychological weapon. An Austrian officer complained of a demoralizing impression that “the French General’s eyes were in our camp.”
However, for most balloonists, the main purpose of what Victor Hugo called “the floating egg” was to feed the imagination and to fill the mind with awe. Like a wonderful hallucinogenic cloud, the balloon was capable of generating seemingly endless novelties. It became possible, as Holmes recounts, to see the sun set twice on the same day, to hear the orchestra of sounds that the earth sent up to the heavens, to navigate under the stars by the smellscape of crops, pine forests, ponds, and chimneys, to explore the realm whose skies were a dark Prussian blue and where butterflies fluttered past as though in a field of flowers.
In April, Peter Conrad emphasized the grimmer side of book’s subjects:
[B]alloonists were dangerous existential gamblers, anxious, as HG Wells put it, “to pass extraordinarily out of human things” and to probe the proper limits of life. Their vertical journeys soon ran out of breathable air, and reached a perimeter where the sky turns black and alien. The last and longest of Holmes’s stories therefore passes from Shelleyan fantasy to Coleridgean horror: a Scandinavian expedition to the north pole by balloon in 1897 turns into a grim re-enactment of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as ice takes the gallant aeronauts captive and slowly kills them. By then those silken puffballs had lost their innocence. The balloons in Jules Verne’s novels are symbols of “imperial command and scientific superiority”, and Holmes casually notices a Prussian officer called Zeppelin observing the ways balloons were used to evade blockades and as eyries for military spies during the American civil war: it was he who later gave his name to a new fleet of engine-powered dirigibles that could rain down destruction from a sky that had become a theatre of battle.
(Image by Claude-Louis Desrais, 1783, via Wikimedia Commons)
The popular and personal thread continues:
My wife and I had been married for about six months before we found out we were expecting. We were so thrilled that we immediately told family, friends, and announced it on social media. We started reading as much information as we could and I started looking online for baby clothes with my favorite sports teams’ logos on them. I was already a proud father. We are religious, and the night we found out I put my hands on my wife’s stomach and we prayed that our baby would be healthy and we’d be good parents.
Five weeks later my wife started bleeding, and the next day she miscarried in the bathroom of our apartment. Later the doctor told us it was too early to have even been a baby and we must have just seen the egg sac, but I’ll never forget my wife’s hysterical screaming and sobbing as we saw what looked to us like a tiny baby-shaped thing. I somehow made it to our couch and broke down sobbing because it hit me that I would never teach our child how to play basketball.
A couple hours later we drove in shock to a nearby park and buried our future plans and hopes in the woods. I said a few words through my tears, never expecting I’d have to bury my own child before it was even a child.
Another reader:
This thread took me back to a dark day nearly 30 years ago. I remember so clearly sitting on my living room sofa with an extra-big maxi pad on, while the remains of what would have been my first child lumpily left my body. Then I went on to have two children and, while I grieved the one I lost, I can’t imagine having any other children than the ones I have. I know intellectually that I would have loved that one as much as I love these two adults who have been a part of my life all these years, but my emotions won’t follow my brain there. I just feel as though these particular people were the ones given to me to love. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but I feel as though I would have grieved not knowing them.
Another:
About seven years ago my wife woke me with a piercing scream. I ran into the bathroom to find her holding a pregnancy test and crying tears of joy. The child we had been trying for years to conceive was finally coming.
Those were some happy months – possibly the happiest in my entire life. That happiness ended in a pediatric cardiologist’s office as my wife and I sat together, holding hands, listening to the doctor explain how our son had a major heart defect that he would not survive. Just one of those things. Nobody’s fault. It just happens and no one knows why.
Abortion was an option on the table, but one we quickly discarded. Our son was too wanted, too loved. We decided to give him what life we could.
The time leading up to his birth is a painful blur. My memories of my wife’s labor is a series of disjointed, painful images. My son’s life stands in sharp contrast to all of that. I remember every moment, every breath he took, how it felt to hold him, the way the world shifted when he died in my arms. The next day we went to the mortuary, gave him a teddy bear and my childhood blanket, watched the flames consume his mortal shell, then finally took him home.
I still can’t drive by the crematorium without crying.
The grief nearly destroyed our marriage, but we survived and now have two other children. Our four-year-old son knows he had a brother and likes to talk to him – which both breaks and warms my heart. Our 18-month-old daughter owes her life to her oldest brother, as it was his condition that convinced a doctor to run the test which discovered her heart defect before it had a chance to do any damage. I like to think my son sacrificed his life to give my daughter a chance to live hers, which helps with the pain somewhat.
We were also fortunate in that we heard of the services of Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep before my oldest son was born. We have a complete picture record of every moment of his life thanks to a photographer who met the darkest moment of our lives with grace, dignity and overwhelming compassion. We are finally at a point in our grief where we can have pictures of all of our children on the walls and I am profoundly grateful that we have something we can show our other children and say “this is your brother”.
Still, I would give everything I have to hold my first-born in my arms one more time.
Another:
I expect you’ll get an outpouring of stories on the topic of miscarriage and stillbirth. It’s a painful experience and one that is often easier to talk about anonymously. I had just read Ariel Levy’s article, barely held back tears all the way through, then after a short walk to clear my head opened up your site and there it was again. Ms. Levy’s account was heartbreaking for me to read since I’ve endured three miscarriages of my own. None were anywhere near this level of drama, but I could still relate and my heart is heavy for her and her child.
Since mine were early miscarriages, sometimes it feels like they don’t count. I had no ultrasound photos, never heard a heartbeat, didn’t even take a photo of my positive tests. No one besides my husband and my doctor knew I was pregnant or even considering it. I lived with a huge weight for three years. (And, even if you do want to share, it’s a little hard to just bring up in conversation.)
When I got pregnant again, for a fourth time, I was terrified. I did not truly believe I would carry this child full term until all of a sudden I held him in my arms. It was only after the birth of my son that I’ve been able to more freely talk about my experiences, because I feel like I’m safely on the other side. Other side of what? I don’t know. A terrible rite of passage maybe.
Those “babies” (mushy bunch of cells, really) were as real to me though as my lively 17-month-old son is now. I was briefly a mother, and then suddenly I wasn’t. (Then again, and again.) I think about them often, though less than I used to (the mind of a working mom of a toddler is full enough). What I wonder the most is who they might have been. Would one of them have been just like my son, but three years older? Would they have had his eyes, his voice, his belly laugh? Or, if the first one had worked out would we have stopped then – in which case, perhaps I would never have met my son?
Gradually the pain has faded and changed into … something else. A deepening perhaps. Motherhood has been a revelation to me. I feel like a hazy curtain has been pulled back and I’ve been tugged across an invisible line, for better or worse and there’s no turning back. Experiencing those losses is part of that journey and I am actually thankful now for having gone through them. Would I feel the same if I didn’t have my son today? If I was still without a child? I can’t say.
Since you’re a poetry guy, I would like to pass along one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems:
The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
I’m in London right now (check out the cartoon) to pick up an award from the British Political Studies Association for “policy innovation,” i.e. the long fight for marriage equality, and to see friends and family. I’m still a little jet-lagged so I’ll keep this short. The weekend saw the breakthrough with Iran that this blog has longed for since 2009. Obama’s pitch perfect speech last night on this remarkable achievement can be watched here. Netanyahu’s continued hole-digging can be seen and assessed here. We were, of course, on call through the weekend, and you can find a post of reactions from around the blogosphere here; terser tweets are here.
The weekend’s recommended short story is here. Luminescent poems from the winner of this year’s National Book Award, Mary Szybist, can be read here and here. I get one-upped by a real Doctor Who aficionado here; Aiden Kimel quietly dismembers the glibness of Richard Dawkins here; while a Dish reader sends a family heirloom photograph of JFK shirtless on a beach.
If you read one post, see this one on re-imagining the concept of “Original Sin” as more simply “The Human Propensity To Fuck Things Up,” or HPtFTU.
The most popular post of the weekend was A Deal With Iran: Blog Reax, followed by A Deal With Iran: Tweet Reax.
See you in the, er, morning.
(Photo: A green leaf in autumn, by Peter McDiarmid/Getty Images)
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