There's No Place Like Home...
and this is no place like it.
still, i've resisted the urge to paint my desert boots cherry red, adorn them with glitter, and walk about clicking my heels a la rommel. perhaps that'll be my halloween costume, although i do so have my heart set on wearing my full body armor with a purple sash and mask. how would a light colonel react to a "turtle power, sir!" do you think?
of course, while there is no place like home, my recent vacation from this, my vacation from life, granted me an opportunity to realize what things about our nation i truly don't miss at all; of course, the first few i've not been given a chance to miss, but that's beside the point:
1. ethnic and racial tensions, often realized in bloodshed
2. simple crime, often realized in bloodshed
3. religious conflict
4. political dysfunction
5. organized crime
the real kicker though, is the omnipresent advertising of the western world. perhaps the language barrier offers me a substantial buffer, or perhaps my tenancy on an iraqi military base prevents me from exposure to their real world, but here on the 'raq i am so sheltered from the bombardment of such campaigns that the first thing i noticed about being home was how annoying and frustrating is the constant violation of our visual and aural personal space. simon and garfunkel were a bit off base: like a cancer grows, my foot. after walking from point a to point b in the atlanta airport, i just wanted to find a dark, quiet space in which to sit in the semi-silence of my own weeping.
honestly, one doesn't realize how ubiquitous and insidious this advertising is until he's been deprived for a lengthy period. flyers, posters, signs, billboards, apparel, radio, television... there is always someone impinging upon our collective and individual consciousnesses. i am truly considering a subscription to satellite radio; i already dvr my nerdy television programmes so i can skip past the commercials.
then again, perhaps i ought to just calm down and have a coke. or is it pepsi? shit. without a catchy jingle, i just can't decide...
3 comments:
XM radio is the greatest thing ever. You'll never want to go back to listening to half an hour of commercials. And at 7 in the morning when every freakin' station is giving you useless news and weather? You're still listening.
The fact that televisions presently don't come with a dvr blows my mind. But again, one of the greatest things on earth.
You should move to Cornwall. The utter lack of billboards and most forms of visual advertising is absolutely delightful -- a tonic for the soul almost. And no mortars or roadside bombs either. But I know exactly what you mean -- on my recent trips back to the states (last year) the assault was painful to say the least.
Admittedly/sadly, I would have to affirm that I have grown at least somewhat numb to the visual onslaught that is the miasma of billboards, signs, posters, et cetera, along the streets and highways. It certainly doesn't please me, but I tolerantly go on with my life (do I really have a choice?).
TV ads, at least visually, don't bother me so much-- there you have
much more control and you can tune in and out, or simply turn the thing off. Your favorite programs, marketed by whatever network/channel they are on, are delivered to you with strings clearly attached, and that is their prerogative, just as it is yours to make the decision of whether the pleasure/escape the show gives you outweighs the nuisance that is the interruption of banal commercials. (Alternatively, now that we are in the aughts, you can get pretty much every show on DVD, sans commercials, provided you are willing to wait a year or so, or spend [ah, consumerism] a bit more to get tivo or dvr)
Now despite the same ability to easily turn a radio off, radio, on the other hand does tend to rile me quite a bit more; this is likely because I most often listen to the radio in the car where there is not a complete spectrum of other activities to keep me occupied. What irks me especially are the stupid call station jingles, e.g. "cool 96.3-- the hits" sung in a most drawn-out, saccharine, fake, happy voice one can muster (This should be illegal-- seriously-- write your representatives NOW). And perhaps even worse are the easy-listening stations (not that I have anything against easy-listening-- well, okay, I do) that repeatedly tell the listener how calm the station will make them and how perfect it is for the workplace (oh, and could you please pass the soma?). To me, the fact that a majority of stations play the same handful of songs ad nauseum is minor compared to this because, no matter how bad, music is at least still music and generally has some value (lyrics aside).
Contrariwise, it does seem like there would be perhaps at least a sprinkling of more sanity and peace if we could blot out some of these fake promises and barrages of 'buy this, buy that' and other games [like department stores' never-ending claims of "This Week Only" sales]. As for the proliferation of visual/mind pollution across the U.S. and elsewhere, aside from pushing legislation against large/hideous/colorful signs (probably too restrictive), I suppose what I should do is make sure I don't make things worse and I guess help to protect some of the areas (forests, meadows, lakes?) that are still in the clear.
Well, that is my rant on the obvious. G'day.
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