LONG RANT ALERT! I’m not here to talk about guns today, at least not specifically. Anyone likely to read this already knows that in spite of the hype and blather by the gun manufacturers, guns… in the hands of mental defectives or outright nut cases… do kill people. They kill thousands of people a year and are the weapon of choice in 67% of the homicides in this country and account for more child deaths than any other single source. And of course, in their rapid firing huge capacity versions, they have certainly become the darlings of the mass murderer/protect me from my government set.
No, what I’d like to talk about today are a couple of the creators of the atmosphere that has brought this nation to a point at which it’s perfectly acceptable to significant portions of the white male population to shoot someone for playing loud music or in many cases, for no reason at all except you don’t like their looks. These are the same white males that… when one of their fellow capacity for mass destruction “enthusiasts” nuts up and shoots a bunch of people… cries and whines that it’s not the time to discuss the epidemic of such incidents that has befouled the country. These are the same white males who would profess to deplore what happened last Friday in Newtown Connecticut while simultaneously threatening anything and everything up to and including deadly force against anyone suggesting that there might be ways to ameliorate the situation that is the root cause of such incidents.
And even if you do accept the lame old saw, “Guns don’t kill people, people do”, you’re still complicit in every one of these tragedies for not calling out the companies and organizations that create and nurture the kinds of people that the NRA and it’s buffoon battalions like to point at as the “real” causes of death in a mass murder situation. And believe me, they know exactly what they’re creating and nurturing when they do it.
Of course, the number one perp in any crime against society of this nature are the manufacturers of the implements by which the crime is carried out. These are usually large corporations or subsidiaries of large corporations and in spite of being termed “people” by the US Supreme court, they are not bound by any sense of societal responsibility that would… along with a smattering of common sense… preclude REAL people like you and I from handing an automatic rifle and a couple of 30 round clips to a mentally ill person and telling him to go forth and enjoy his new toy.
Unlike real people not manufactured by SCOTUS fiat, these corporations have no allegiance to anyone except themselves and their mainly institutional shareholders and no duty or purpose for existence other than to provide the maximum in return on investment to those shareholders. Many of them have become targets of interest for hedge funds and other aggregations of institutional or professional “activist” investors whose SOP is to buy a major stake in a company and then dictate the day to day operations of that company with the purpose of maximizing it’s own return, usually to the detriment of the company itself and to the detriment of the public at large.
So now we have a hedge fund… part of a group of Wall Street entities that openly and vehemently deny the merest suggestion that they might have any responsibility to the rest of the country… actively engaged in the manufacture of murder weapons that are unique in that they have no readily discernible purpose in the hands of civilians other than to kill other civilians. How best to market their product?
Enter the advertising industry. In a nation of pimps whose sole purpose is to deliver the general public into the hands of the corporations intent on screwing them into the ground, the advertising industry occupies a position only about one notch above the US congress. We give them that one notch because being pimps is their sole reason for existence, whereas congress pimps were actually elected to do just the opposite of what they’re doing.
This is a real ad, (courtesy of upworthiest.com ) produced by a real advertising agency and aimed directly at the demographic they deemed would be the most likely to buy military grade killing machines. This ad would never have seen the light of day had not careful demographic studies shown conclusively that the best target for this particular targeted ad campaign was white males suffering from deep rooted feelings of sexual inadequacy. if there’s any doubt in your mind that this was NOT what the little copywriter dude was thinking when he inked this thing, I suspect there’s at least one AR-15 based weapon somewhere in your house and I’m just wondering… how does it feel to know that this is what the company that sold it to you thinks of you?
As you can see, it doesn’t require as much strain on the thought processes in order to get the message it’s intended to convey. Straightforward and to the point, that’s my motto. None of that namby pamby beating around the bush crap. YOU have a problem. Nothing to be ashamed of, a lot of white males… as many as 47% of them… have the same problem. BUSHMASTER knows exactly what your problem is and has the ultimate placebo... er.... medicine for it. It just doesn’t get any simpler than that.
Seriously, my point here is that this is what advertising does. It pigeonholes us, categorizes us according to various psychological criteria and then presses the buttons that program us to be the good little consumerbots we’ve always been, buying what we’re supposed to buy when we’re supposed to buy it, watching what we’re supposed to watch, reading what we’re supposed to read. It’s not always as obvious as in the case above but since a large percentage of the price you pay for anything you purchase these days it is… or should be… something that you spend more than a hundredth of a second thinking about because it also creates people like Adam Lanza;s mother and to a large extent. Adam Lanza himself.
Most often it’s no more than simply matching the fat, belly scratching humanoid sitting in front of his TV every Sunday with the beer of the day or hyping the latest big whatever to people who couldn’t pour piss out of their boots without some self styled Dr. Soanso or other “expert” to tell them how on their TV machines.
It’s all part of the bread and circuses around which the sad little lives of most of America’s huge flock of consumer sheep revolve, designed to keep attention spans short and block any awareness that they… like the wannabe gunslinger referred to above… ARE sheep. Other times it leads to consequences that should be too terrible for even a big shot ad agency to contemplate. Unfortunately, ad agencies are probably less likely to think about the moral and ethical considerations involved in what they’re doing than a hedge fund manager is.
So sleep tight America. Pete the Patriot is at his ever vigilant post with his M4A1 AWS and his truckload of high capacity clips… ready to lay down his life solely to defend you from that black guy that you elected as your president… or maybe get even with all those bastards over at the Elk’s that turned down his membership app… huh? Oh never mind.
That’s all provided he’s not passed out on his couch in front of Sunday Night Football with a beer can balanced on his hairy belly while his four year old sits in the corner playing with the fully loaded symbol of daddy’s manhood. We salute you Pete. You make us not only safe, but proud. Heh!