Bumper Stickers
I love bumper stickers. While driving on the I-95 on the way to Hartford, I
will speed up in my ChevyMothra SUV to come within inches of the car in
front of me, just to gaze at its lovely bumper sticker. And even though
people in Connecticut consider it gauche to do this, I’m from Joisey, where
gauche is a way of life.
Some bumpers stickers are actually worth the effort:
I love animals, they taste great.
EARTH FIRST! We’ll stripmine the other planets later.
“Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.”
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
These new bumper stickers are great! But what about some of the older
bumper stickers from the 60’s and 70’s, that angst-ridden time where Baby
Boomers honed their free sex and fearmongering skills. With a wee bit of
updating, those bumper stickers can be brought back to life:
Honk If You’re ADHD. Again. Again.
I’d Rather Be Outsourcing
War Is Healthy for Cheney and Other Nonliving Things
I Brake for Charlize Theron
Avian Flu Fever!
The Jackson 5 (to 10 with Good Behavior)
My Other Car Is Another Infiniti
Anyway, a word of advice. Some of those old bumper stickers, like Off the
Pigs or Throw the Fuzz Out, might not be understood by today’s younger
police force. The old guys who know what they mean are now behind desks or
tending bar at the Off The Pigs Deli and Salon in Skokie, Illinois. And
anyway, why insult the hard working police, anyway, when you can go after
tastier targets: Off The Outsourcers, Throw The CFOs Out! With a little
imagination, you might even find something funny to say about the White
House….
I’m in Dallas this week for the League Conference on Information Technology. It’s very interesting and I even managed to attend some of the discussions and presentations despite the fact that I’m mainly here to represent my company. I love the discussions and the presentations and the exchange of ideas. I guess I simply love knowledge. And, this got me thinking about my role in society.
I’m a salesman. It doesn’t sound like a very glamorous fact, but in a way I’m proud to be a salesman. The role is often dressed up in lots of fancy language like Marketing Director, Director of Communications, Internet Marketing Professional, etc. However, the fundamental fact remains that at the core we marketing people are all just salespeople pushing a product or an idea.
However, the long derided role of salesperson gets interesting and starts to command some respect when you begin to think about how many people in our society are actually salespeople in one way or another.
Think of all the PR flacks and all the ad execs everywhere. Think of the legions employed by the Drug, Oil, Financial, and Technology industries. Nearly all the employees of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and others are completely involved in building the biggest advertising and sales machine the world has ever known.
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Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World noted yesterday that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, has decided to speak out about what he witnessed during his tenure. Tom summed the Financial Times piece where Wilkerson speaks out brilliantly:
“What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” Wilkerson said. He also added that The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it.”
With this information now becoming public, I’m realizing how prophetic my pseudo-satire piece on the Abu Ghraib scandal, which linked the deeds there straight up to Rumsfeld and the President, really was.
This piece was written in May of 2004, directly following the Abu Ghraib abuses. I had no idea how right I’d be.
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Homeland security czar Michael Chertoff wants to seal our borders and boot out our large immigrant population. (The full text of his comments is available at the DHS Homepage: here)
I doubt this is possible, but if it were the price to our economy would be large.
Chertoff and other border enthusiasts like to talk about “immigrants,” but what they always mean is Mexicans. We aren’t talking about an over-abundance of Canadian loggers, here.
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The introduction of the Video iPod by Apple is a wonderful next step in the advancement of our being entertained at all times by all things. What is annoying is that video is still in short supply in so many places where it is needed.
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The staff of American Madness would like to thank the 