“Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism-perhaps the most powerful …
New Bait, New Hook
“No longer would Americans buy to fit in or impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to express their revulsion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture by the branches of American business studied here marked the consolidation of a new species of …
Commodify the Revolution
One of the things I will be doing in this Devil in a Blue Dress thread will be to assemble quotations from a stack of books I have read on the matters surrounding pop culture. I thought I would share them with you as I gather them, although with minimal comment. The comment will come …
Lord of the Beans
I have sometimes lamented our contemporary loss of any sense of antiquity, grandeur, or nobility. I have argued that the trivialization of Bible stories in things like Veggie Tales represents a far greater tone deafness to the story as God told it than any gain it represents in knowledge of broad plot outlines, or in …
More On the Stars and Bars
At last, some specifics. A traditional Irish band named Potatohead submitted a letter to the editor in this evening’s Daily News that helps us identify the source of at least one of the Confederate battle flag stories. But before getting into this, let us just say that this band (every time I heard them) played …
Torture and Terror
Marvin Olasky set off some vigorous discussion over at Worldmagblog by quoting Thomas Sowell, and asking what people thought. Some of it spilled my way, with someone writing and asking what I thought. Here is how Marvin framed the question: “Re. the recent Senate debate on banning torture, Thomas Sowell writes, ‘If a captured terrorist …
Reseerch Perfesser
Tom Garfield wrote a letter to the editor setting the record straight on the alleged neo-Confederate nature of Logos School. In that letter he challenged Nick Gier’s great abilities in sitting loose to the facts, and invited him up to Logos School to have a look around for himself. You know, looking around for yourself …
Creme de la Creme
A few days ago, a comment on one of my posts noted that Southern Slavery As It Was had been dropped from the banned and/or challenged list of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Today when I had a moment, I went to check, and, sure enough, there our booklet wasn’t. In other words, …
Salem Witch Trials
One of our local intoleristas recently wrote the following: “Wilson believes that God has a relationship with the Church in which the state cannot interpose. The relationship between God and any one individual is secondary to the relationship between God and, essentially, the whole of Christendom. The Church therefore has a divinely ordained right to …
Not On the Ballot
Here in Moscow we are having our city council elections tomorrow. And of course, I would urge all Christians who are living within the city limits of Moscow to do their civic duty and get out there and vote. For those who are readers of this blog residing elsewhere, it is quite possible that there …