Advertising and Identity Politics

Is there a link between advertising and identity politics? This ad for a 1958 Edsel was posted on a Usenet newsgroup recently. I read it several times, and that question and some tangential thoughts developed.

The text is fascinating. The italicised arrived tell the reader that it’s not just about pulling up in front of the house. The car is a “status symbol”, a phrase much used in the 1950s to deprecate advertising. But some 60 years on, the text looks like it’s about more than mere status. It’s about achieving an identity, that of a successful businessman. It’s about being recognised as a person of importance. It’s about getting the respect the Edsel owner clearly deserves.

It begins by touting the car as a signal of status and identity: Other drivers spot that classic vertical grill a block away. Whomever the Edsel owner encounters will treat him as he deserves.

The neighbours will admit you deserve respect, too. And parked in front of your home, your Edsel always gets even more attention. It says you chose elegant styling....  And it all comes at the lowest cost of the medium-priced cars. Status at a bargain, which stamps the buyer as a canny money manager besides all his other virtues.

Advertising always tells a story. This ad tells the story of a successful white middle-class man, someone who has transformed himself from whatever he was before he started working towards this day. The day he drives up in a brand new red two-door hard-top Edsel in front of his a ranch style home, his good-looking (slim) wife, his two charming children. He’s wearing a suit, white shirt and tie, and a hat. He has arrived, he’s achieved the American Dream.

That dream doesn’t consist of house, car, clothes, or other goods. Those are mere signs and symbols of what actually matter: status, identity, privilege. By linking the Edsel to success, the ad assumes the values that prompt the striving for success. By taking those values for granted, the ad creates an assumption of shared values. That in turn reinforces those values. The central value is being somebody.

I think the link to identity politics is obvious. Identity politics is about being respected. More, it’s about being accepted as worthy of respect, as deserving acknowledgment, as having one’s proper place in society. It’s about having the same status as everyone else. It’s about being somebody instead of being ignored, deprecated, disrespected. It’s about deserving to achieve the American Dream.

How to spell ʃ (and brief a note on English spelling)

     

     English spelling is notoriously problematic. It's a mashup of several different spelling conventions, made worse by a number of inconsistencies. Teaching spelling is also problematic. English-speaking countries focus on letters instead of sounds, so much so, that some English speakers refer to "alphabetic languages". Another result of this focus is the insistence on correct spelling for words that are never confused when speaking. That's just two (too, to) effects of confusing letters and sounds.

     Every language uses a specific set of sounds, called phonemes. Most languages use around three dozen phonemes. An "accent" consists of variations of the phonemes, and may have more or fewer phonemes than the standard version. The English alphabet is borrowed from the ancient Romans, with a few additions. We have 26 letters for about 40 sounds. Q and X each spell two sounds, which could be spelled KW and KS. C duplicates the sounds of S and K. In effect we have only 23 letters. So we use letter combinations (which include  "silent letters"), and spelling conventions that signal different sound values. But for many common words, one must memorise the spelling.

     And there's a twist: English speakers are more willing to adopt foreign words than just about anybody else. Along with the words we usually adopt the foreign spellings. So we end up with multiple spellings for the same sound.

     One of these sounds is the one that begins "she". It has more spellings than any other sound. Here are the most familiar ones:

How to spell ʃ

Common words:
oCEan
groCery *
CHef
caCHE
suspiCIon
Sugar
nauSEous
faSCist
conSCIence
SHine
aSSure
seSSIon
naTIon

From other languages:
FuCHSia
GauTHier **
SCHnapps

* Regional dialect
** Pronunciation varies

Footnote 1: Linguists have identified about 400 distinct sounds used by the known languages. Another linguistics concept is the "morpheme": think of it as a unit of meaning. For example combine the base "dog" (which refers to an animal) with "s" (which means "more than one), and you get "dogs".  Some linguists refer to the spelling unit as a "grapheme": a letter or combination of letters that spells a single phoneme, or some conventional combination of phonemes.

Footnote 2: Phonemes and sounds are not the same. The essence of a phoneme is that it signals a difference in meaning. Thus in "sing" and "sang", the sounds spelled by "a" and "i"  are phonemes  because  the two words have different meanings. On the other hand, the  sounds spelled by "ng" in "singer" and "finger" are different in most English dialects, but the difference is ignored. If they were phonemes, then "singer" rhymed with "finger" would be a different word than its usual pronunciation. (And in "ginger", "ng" spells a combination of three phonemes.)

Footnote 3: Homonyms come in two varieties: two words with the same spelling but different sounds (and meanings), called homographs. And two (or more) words with the same sound but different spellings (and meanings), called homophones. The study of homonyms helps one to understand the difference between a sound and a phoneme.

Footnote 4: Almost every phoneme in English is spelled two or more ways. Every letter and most letter combinations stand for two or more phonemes.
 

Class war? Yes, always.

NYT comment 2020-01-17 on “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy”, by David Brooks, in which he argued that there is no class war.

There has always been a class war. Rulers and ruled do have common interests, nicely summarised in the Canadian triplet of "peace, order, and good government." But they also have different interests, and these sooner or later lead to more or less open conflict.

Nevertheless, I think Brooks is correct: Values matter more than economics. Economics is a means, not and end. We want a strong economy not because a strong economy is good in itself but because it enables us to achieve our non-economic goals.

It seems to me that two of the central values of all human societies  are fairness and justice. Capitalism as it is practiced these days is unfair and unjust. The irony is that Trump's promise to "drain the swamp", to  punish China for stealing jobs, to restore good old American manufacturing and mining jobs etc, all these promises appealed to these values. That's why so many centrists and independents voted for him. That's why the Democratic hopefuls have to emphasise fairness and justice. E.g., the present tax system is unfair to the 99%. Dumping pollutants into the air, earth, and water is a form of freeloading, which is unjust. And so on.

The Dems' campaign is at bottom about fairness and justice. The leftist term "class war" is a distraction, especially so in a country where a sizeable minority freaks out at any hint of "socialism."

Cicero and Public Debt: A fake quote, but it gives one to think. (Repost)

 

 A statement allegedly (1) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 106 – 7 December 43 BC):

The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero lived in an empire, which was rich enough to pay the costs of military occupation and administration of the (ever longer) supply chains that sustained Rome. Whoever put these words in his mouth thought as if Cicero lived in a subsistence economy, one that's barely able to meet the needs of its citizens. They were wrong. (2)

We live in an economy capable of even greater over-production than Rome. We make too much, but we still think about our economy as if we can't make enough (3). That causes a lot of stupid decisions, whose effects are now becoming clear: Too many people (4), too much production and consumption, too much exploitation of natural resources (5), etc, all of which are the causes of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, and the many sociopolitical crises around the world. The only question left is which crisis will destroy our way of life first, and just how bad it will be. If we don't learn to think differently, we won't adapt fast enough to survive with anything remotely like our present way of life (6).

Having made such gloomy pronouncements, I still wish you a good day. :-)

Footnotes:
1. From https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/19/fact-check-cicero-quote-budgeting-treasury-public-debt/
“The quote does not appear in any of Cicero’s surviving works. It actually comes from best-selling author Taylor Caldwell’s novel about ancient Rome.” Note the phrase "assistance to foreign lands": Rome never did this. And the phrase "public assistance" is American, not Roman.

2. Any empire capable of maintaining itself for any length of time clearly was capable of producing far more than its citizens needed. Rome had about three times as many “statutory holidays” as we have, thus a much shorter working year. Even slaves got some time off on those holidays.

3. The USA spends over a trillion dollars per year on its armed forces and the wars they fight.

4. In my lifetime, the Earth’s human population has grown more than fourfold. 1940: about 2 billion.  2021: over 8 billion.

5. It’s likely that there won’t be enough food to feed all human beings sometime between 2025 and 2050, not because we don't produce enough, but because we insist on using "the market" to for its production and distribution.

6. Just how different will it be? Best case: Something like a medieval life-style for the survivors, with small farms producing enough food to sustain the necessary artisans and traders. Worst case: Back to the stone age, with perhaps some of the survivors being able to scavenge useful materials like iron from the ruins. That is, if humans don't go extinct.

I was lucky...

I was lucky, I guess. I learned not only habits of mind, but substance of value. Both have informed my life.

The habit of analysing a text to discover the interplay of surface and depth, to uncover its connections to the culture in which it's embedded, to think thoughts I couldn't otherwise think, all these have enriched my life. Most of all, they've helped me get some inkling of what it's like to be someone else.

As for substance: The works I read for my degree have common themes. They are all riffs on the central insight of our religions and philosophies: that connection with other human beings is the only thing that makes life worth living.

My faith tradition supplies one version of this insight: "Love God, and love your neighbour." To love God means to love his creation. To love your neighbour means to see each other as precious beings. To do both means to be overwhelmed by awe at the gift of being alive.

It was the study of secular texts that brought me to see the sacred texts as primary. They are historically the first ones to teach those habits of mind and those matters of substance. That's why they endure. And that's why study of the humanities remains essential. Without the discipline of deep reading, a text will feed the darkest impulses of the human heart.

 

Three Haiku

1.
Frog in sunlit pond
Heron stalking with prim steps
Bubbles on water

2.
Planes glide through blue air
Silver fish in white water
Death waits for his time

3.
Tulips stand bravely
By dark cedar hedge, spilling
Colours like water

 2022.05.24

Airplane travel

We don’t travel on airplanes, we are shipped from one location to another like parcels of fish.

Sure, there are windows from which we can observe the clouds, if any, and the topography, which looks so little like the maps we’ve filed in our memories that we can barely recognise our location. That’s why some like to watch the display of the flight path over a vaguely aerial view of the ground. The alternative is to watch a movie, which seems a more honest admission that we can’t experience flight as travel.

Travel requires not only movement, but the sensation, the awareness, the feeling of movement. There is none such when we fly in a modern aircraft. The plane may as well be standing still somewhere in space with the surroundings flowing past. A car isn’t much different: we sit still in the car, and the road, the landscape, the air move past us. Does this mean the car is moving? Hard to say, until something interrupts the motion of the car, and we move inside the car and possibly out of it. The absence of the sensation of movement explains why driving and flight simulators work so well.                                

Travel requires agency. We move ourselves, by moving our limbs. We move across and through our surroundings. In a plane, in a car, in a train, we are carried by the machine. The only machine that enables us to travel is the bicycle, which we cause to move by moving our limbs, just as we cause our body to move by moving our limbs.

“Travel by airplane” misrepresents what’s actually happening. The plane transports us, just as it transports our bags.  Just like a parcel of fish.