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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.