Plumbing to electrical/Heating to air conditioning/If
you can’t we can/Michael & Son!
In this relentlessly fractious
world, it sometimes seems as if there’s just one thing on which everyone agrees—hatred
of advertising.
Once societally regarded as at worst a tolerable quid pro quo for delivering the radio and TV programming
we enjoy—and at best a source of memorable jingles and clever wordplay—on-air
ads now are almost universally loathed. Baby boomers like me are cutting the cable
cord in part to avoid them. Instant gratification-demanding millennials can’t
imagine a bigger waste of their precious time.
To which I have three words:
Just. Shut. Up.
OK, I don’t love advertising. It isn’t as if I’m happy to hear that obnoxiously insipid “I-877
Kars for Kids” vehicle-donation spot crank up. I, too, change the radio station
in the car when the classic rock station is in the midst of an ad block longer than
even the endless Iron Butterfly song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” It’s not hyperbole,
however, to say that radio and TV advertising helps keep me keep me sane in a
world that has gone increasingly mad. For me, it’s a reassuring tether that calms
my waking hours.
Ads are my connection to a largely
lost world in which things had order and made sense. In which nobody got
something for nothing. In which it was understood that much of life is kind of
tedious, and that that’s OK, maybe even character-building. In which some things
never change, like the insistent reliability of Michael & Son when your HVAC
system has gone haywire, and the conviction that, for all your oriental
rug-cleaning needs, just one call to Joe Hadeed will do the trick.
I mean, let’s not sugar-coat
the current state of the planet. Things are changing at a dizzying pace, and in
extremely few cases for the better. Both the atmospheric and the sociopolitical
climate are spiraling downward. Wars and famine are escalating. Wisdom and vision
are sorely needed, but our leaders, elected and not, are autocrats, petty
tyrants or ineffectual bumblers. It’s All Going to Hell. When I tell people that
I’m glad I’m 58 and not 28 because I believe that extra 30 years will, in the not-too-distant
future, be the difference between impervious death and full, agonizing immersion
in the shitstorm to come, I find that my pessimism encounters little blowback. I
sense growing consensus that this may be, and probably is, It. That the jig may
well be up.
People respond to this reality
in various ways. Some, counterintuitively, become parents, in willful optimism
that maybe, just maybe, their kids and that new generation will do a vastly
better job than have the existing ones at pulling everything back from the
precipice. Young people are either too preoccupied with loan-repayment and scarce
job prospects to dwell on the Earth’s future, or they bank on the ability of
their friend, technology, to solve all the world’s ills. Those established in
their working careers retreat into Netflix and YouTube, or banter on Facebook.
People my age and older get mad, get sad, maybe join protests, maybe find
solace in their place on mortality tables.
I take comfort in the
repetition and sameness of advertising. I actually listen to the ads. I know the
words. I hum the jingles to myself—even, sometimes, the ones I find grating,
which nevertheless worm their way into my brain. I welcome the distraction. I
wonder what Dr Alison Tendler is really like, and whether she’s shunned by her
fellow ophthalmologists for shilling on TV for the drug Restasis. I think about
how much I used to like Tina Fey before she apparently decided she desperately needed
the money she gets from American Express to laud their credit card
approximately 15,000 times a day on any given television channel. I even
daydream about past ad campaigns, hearing long-dead naturalist Euell Gibbons
observe appreciatively that Grape-Nuts cereal reminds him of the taste of wild
hickory nuts, and wondering why buying the world a Coke never resulted in world
peace, when the joyous young people on the hilltop in that sunny commercial had
seemed so certain that it would.
My perfect afternoon, in a
sense, is one spent working in the yard while listening to
the radio. The music often is that of my youth—a far less complicated, fraught
and fragmented era. The baseball games evoke an unchanging timelessness. I may hear
the same ads 50 times in the course of my toils, but I generally don’t mind. There’s
a rhythm to it, a drumbeat that parallels the act of methodically pulling weeds or cutting row after row of
grass. It’s as comfortable as the old sneakers I’m wearing as I restore order
to the front lawn. I could be 15 or 35 or 75, out there in nature, doing the same thing. Working up
an honest sweat. Earning, afterward, a cold drink and the breeze of a fan
pointed directly at me. It’s great stuff. It’s a wonderful constant. It makes
me happy in a way that few things do.
Advertising, for all its repetition
and banality, is a part of all that. I feel kind of sorry for those who
deprive themselves of its comforts by regarding it as an irredeemable nuisance.
I haven’t expressed any of
this as elegantly or coherently as I would’ve liked. I’m a
little distracted by a loud deluge of rain falling outside my window. I told my
sleeping cat Moz at the outset that I don’t quite have it today—that just
because I take the day off from work to write doesn’t mean the best words will obligingly
show up at the end of my typing finger. I certainly don’t fancy that I’ve changed
anyone’s mind.
All I’m saying is that,
unlike everyone else, I don’t want TV and radio ads to go away. I get why
people despise them, but I hate to see them underutilized. Succumb! They can help you through days that are filled with horrible news—the dismantling of
democracy in America, the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, chemical warfare
in Syria. Ads won’t make any of that go away. But they can, somehow, improbably,
dull the panic a little. They can provide subconscious mantras that will leaven the
discord just enough to be helpful.
Trust me on this. Trust
Michael & Son to get it done.
