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| image generated via Google Gemini |
For the sake of mankind, stringent and rational constraints have to, starting yesterday, be imposed upon the American advertising industry (and probably elsewhere, too). Indeed, what is needed is nothing less than an entirely new model, for the televisual advertising apparatus has leapt too many proverbial sharks to be reformed or redeemed. The sheer cacophony and inanity to which one is subjected merely to watch a ball game—or most any broadcast at all—is increasingly intolerable, yet the American public, as with so much else, remains insensate to the psychic warfare daily waged upon them in the service of crony capitalism. (‘Crony’ is the operative word; I am no foe of capitalism per se, but we long ago surpassed the point at which the beast required taming and proper stewardship.)
Yes—psychic warfare it is, with the populace as its unresisting casualties. Every operative of the advertising agencies might well deserve committal, so relentless is the idiocy they have strewn across our airwaves and into our very consciousness over decades. Pure f**king garbage, in layman’s terms.
Does anyone ever pause to reflect upon the sheer juvenility and absurdity of roughly ninety-five per cent of these advertisements? Is there no one—besides myself—who yearns for a quieter, more decorous and properly ordered nation and world? Must we truly profess such affection for the prattling gecko, the mawkish caveman, the washed-up sitcom geeks in the T-Mobile spots, or that benighted emu and his handler Doug, along with the countless other inanities to which we are ceaselessly subjected? Do we not care that so many of the songs which accompanied our coming of age have been debased into mere marketing jingles?
A less intrusive, more humane model of advertising must be forged, though, as with so much else, I fear we are already too far gone to rescue ourselves from the abyss. —Arthur Newhook, 1 October 2025.
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