President Elect Jake, From Snake Farm
It seems that the auto makers, auto insurance companies, fast food, and pharmaceutical company advertising campaigns have finally achieved the seemingly impossible mission of stupefying the American public into somnambulism — zombies that have one hand on their cell phones and their other hand on their wallets. The prevailing advertising strategies? The more stressed, stupid, and distracted you are, the more likely you are to impulse-buy a “professional grade” truck. “Buy this! No? How about some auto insurance?” “Would you like fries with your truck insurance? No? Well, okay, but will you just think about it for five minutes until I can remind you again?” You may have noticed that I like using questions as a literary device, so here’s another: How in the hell did this happen to us?
While we were multitasking, i.e., performing slap-and-tickle, half-assed work and playing Angry Birds while a dumpster fire singed our Constitution, the behemoth multinational corporations were busy assaulting our sensibilities with a shock-and-awe campaign. Deploying “Jake from State Farm,” “Flo from Progressive,” ” …and Doug” as the tip-of-the-spear storm troopers on a mission to stupefy the American public into commercial narcolepsy. Flooding the zone of our sensibilities is a trillion dollar continuous bombardment designed to stress, stupefy, and distract, and it seems to be working. If you don’t think so, just ask yourself: Is “melty” a real word? Does the phrase “Nobody out-pizzas the Hut” make grammatical (or any other) sense? Anyway, why should this bother me?