Category: Marketing and Propaganda

11/16/15

Varieties of stepping up

“Hell yeah, I would. No look, you gotta, you gotta step up, man.

—Jeb Bush, 9 Nov 2015, in response to the question whether he’d kill Hitler as a baby, if he could

Not to be ragging on Jeb Bush, because (despite an earlier post) for the most part, I just don’t give him no nevermind at all. But these remarks really struck me, for two reasons.

First, because he’s willing to say—while campaigning for president of our country—that he would commit infanticide, if he knew in advance the child’s future life history and found it sufficiently objectionable.

Second, because he did not say, while campaigning for president of our country, “If I could go back in time to when Hitler was a baby? I’d kidnap him so I could raise him in a loving, nurturing home where he’d have the chance to mature into a loving, caring person himself, instead of a genocidal monster.”

Apparently, murder is the only solution to the problem he could come up with, or it’s the only one he thought Republican voters would want to hear.

11/30/12

Things that would make even Dickens go “hmmm…”

Candy CoalHaving just finished Joe Romm’s excellent new book, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga on the myriad uses of the techniques of rhetoric, I momentarily thought to title this post “Christmas Candy Coal Stocking-Stuffer: Naughty, Not Nice,” but just couldn’t get it past my gag reflex. In any case, I don’t know whether this is a now-classic holiday candy that I just never noticed before, being not inclined these days to frequent that particular supermarket aisle, but the galvanized steel tub brimming with boxes of it right at the check-out line in Trader Joe’s yesterday was impossible to miss.

In fact—as I’ve since learned—if you web search “candy coal” you’ll find a ton of it, from chunky mint chocolate candy coal, to chunky hard licorice candy coal (comes with its own Victorian-style hammer, for the experience of breaking it into yet smaller chunks!), to recipes for how to make your own, and a lot of ads referring to the traditional “If you kids don’t behave you’ll get a lump of coal in your stockings for Christmas, instead of presents!” right before noting how sweet the stuff is when made from dark chocolate instead of compressed carbon. That’ll teach ’em.

At a younger, more naive age, I might’ve gone oh… hmmm… cute, I guess, but whatever. Pardon my rather distinct lack of trust on this, but these days, with our fossil-fuel-driven massively uncontrolled chemical experimentation on the atmosphere leading to ever greater climate disruption, with Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming racketing around in my brain, with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign to replace dirty coal-fired power plants with clean renewable energy, Bill McKibben’s Do The Math tour promoting divestment from fossil fuel interests, politicians afraid to use the word climate (unless they’re the sort who attack the scientists and the science), and ever-more-aggressive pushback from the coal and oil industries, it’s a very different hmmm… indeed.

Yes, of course I’d love some Candy Coal! And could I please have some Light Sweet Crude Maple Agave to go with that? Perfect!

Yeah, right. I need a candy cigarette.