Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1990-08-22, Page 5Advertisers take aim at kids Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelli­ gence long enough to get money from it. Stephen Leacock What a curious beast is this thing called advertising. It is, by and large, a pheno­ menon of our times. Nineteenth century Canadians didn’t have - or need -- full page magazine ads or 30-second TV spots to tell them They Deserved A Break Today or when it was Time For A Blue. We are not so fortunate. There's probably not a Canadian alive who can remember a time when he or she was not being exhorted to buy a carton of this or a six-pack of that. We are the Consumer Society, born to shop ’til we drop and buy 'til we die. It’s pervasive and, like the hole in the ozone, it seems to get bigger every year. I don’t know about you, but I hardly watch any TV these days. Not since the advertis­ ing breaks got to be longer than the 1 The International Scene Separatist sentiments bloom around the world BY RAYMOND CANON Mercifully I was able to spend most of the last days of the great Meech Lake debate in Europe. Frankly I had become somewhat weary of listening to the same arguments ad absurdum; in many cases these arguments were being put forth by people who had only a partial knowledge of the accord. As for those who had to listen, I would hazard a guess that few indeed were able to listen to it all without becoming confused. This should not be construed as an indication that I am not interested in the future of our country. As a bilingual Canadian and one who has supported bilingualism (at least the more sensible aspects of it), I could hardly be anything less than concerned. However, what we have been witnessing here is not unique in contemporary history; separatism is a cause whose time seems to have come in a number of places. To see a prime example of that, we have only to go to the home of the Common­ wealth - Gt. Britain. For a number of years the Scots have chafed under the current system which sees most decisions concern­ ing them made not in Glasgow or 1 Edinburgh but in London. The Scots think that the English take them pretty much for granted and it is quite obvious that many Scots believe strongly that their welfare could be better served if the decision-mak­ ing process which affects them could be transferred from London and located north of the border. Does all that sound familiar? Since I married into a very Scottish family, I learned long ago never to confuse the Scots with the English. It’s safe to say that the Scots do not feel English or even British; they are Scottish pure and simple and they guard their language with the same intensity that the Swiss do with Swiss German. All this understandably leads to rather pronounced separatist sentiments that are not going to go away. If anybody is an expert on separatism, it should be poor old Mikhail Gorbachev who has been watching it break out all over the Soviet Union. Leading the parade are the Lithuanians followed closely by the Lat­ vians and the Estonians. However, the Georgians and the Armenians in the south of the country could, given their Baltic cousins a real battle. Everybody knows that the Ukranians are all separatists at heart program segments. Other media aren’t much better. Have you bought a copy of the Toronto Daily Star recently? It’s Canada’s largest paper, and if you ever run up against a Saturday edition you’ll have no trouble believing it. It looks like a copy of this paper following an overdose of steroids. You practically need a wheelbarrow to get the monster from the newsstand to your easy chair. But the thing is -- it’s mostly advertising! Take out the flyers, the circulars, the full page spreads for appliances and supermarket specials, the real estate section, the classified section, the travel bumf and the used car listings — and you won’t have enough editorial content to fill the belly button of a cub reporter. Newspapers like the Star are misnamed. They should be called Adpapers. Oh well, as my uncle (he’s with the prestigious law firm Sue, Grabbit and Runne) says: “Don’t- knock it sonny - advertising makes the world go ‘round.’’ 1 suppose he’s right. I just wish advertisers were a little classier about it. Have you heard, for instance, about the latest frontier to be cracked by advertisers? It’s grooming products. For children. Seriously. Hair shampoo, conditioners, sunblock, moisturizing lotions, liquid and have been for many years. With these feelings so rampant'in the Soviet Union, who knows where it is going to end? Not too far away from Gorbachev is Yugoslavia. The word means literally land of the South Slavs’’ but it is fair to say that some of the people living there today are not even Slavic in addition, if you look at previous maps of Europe, you will see that there have been various countries there before and, like Poland, at times there wasn’t anything. Thus we have a collection of Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs, Macedonians and Albanians, to name only a few that make up the country. To say that they get along well is a gross exaggeration; they all have their own private interests and do not care too much about what the rest of the country thinks. Thus Yugoslavia is coming very close to falling apart. To make matters worse the economy is in very bad shape with inflation Letter Writer says column offends memory of dead THE EDITOR, After reading your Letter From the Editor last week concerning the tragic deaths of four youths and one girl, I feel very offended. Jeanne Saldivar is my granddaughter and your letter implies liquor could have contributed to the cause of their accident. I know the post mortems conducted Monday at Stratford Hospital showed neither driver was impaired. Closed bottles were in Jeanne’s car. I don’t know what, if any, was in the boys’ car. Everybody is so quick to pre-judge teenagers. If you had been at the Whitney-Ribey Funeral Home or Seaforth United Church, you would have only heard or seen glowing tributes on behalf of Jeanne. Ross Ribey’s Funeral Home was not big enough to hold the huge crowd. Your letter was beautiful, until you brought in the subject of alcohol. We know that alcohol does contribute to some accidents, but when you used their accident as an example of what happens to teenagers on weekends, please suppose your own child had been a victim, then how would you feel if the editor of Seaforth or Clinton or anywhere else wrote this letter hinting this was the reason for their accident? I hope my daughter June does not see soaps, after-bath powders - that sort of thing - aimed strictly at upscale infants and trendy toddlers. Right now, the advertisers are engaging in a little pre-emptive psychological war­ fare, softening up the resistance they expect to get when they start targeting a consumer group that hasn’t even hit puberty yet. The ad boys are calling their pre-pubescent product line “developmen­ tally appropriate’’. They’re insisting that vanity products will “instill a sense of personal pride in children’’. Goodies such as Wild Grape Body Shampoo Gel will, they say, make kids feel special and enhance their self-esteem. Sure. And if pigs had wings, advertisers would figure out a way to sell them flight insurance. Well, after all, this is the industry that gave us vaginal deodorant and basketball shoes that pump themselves up. Like most voracious parasites, advertising constantly needs new hosts to feed off. Kiddy exploitation is just a natural progression, I guess. But it bums me out. And the next time I enter a department store I’ll be humming a paraphrase of that Old John Donne line: “Ask not for whom the cash register tolls, it tolls for thee. And thy kids.’’ running rampant and stagnation the order of the day. It is difficult to see everybody engaging in economic co-operation when the political version is the farthest thing from their minds. In western Europe, the most blatant case of separatism is to be found in Belgium where the Flemish (Dutch) speaking Belgians in the north and the French or Walloons in the south have an extremely difficult time in getting along. One of the few things that holds the country together is the royal family but King Baudouin has his work cut for him. Both the Flemish and the Walloons are watching each other like hawks to see if one gets a favour that the other doesn’t. After all this it is not difficult to note that Canada has plenty of company when it comes to separatist sentiments. Small wonder that a lot of people outside of Canada are watching to see how we handle our differences of opinion. your letter. I am sure you will not want to print my letter. Your paper is getting too gruesome. One week there were seven or eight court case reports. Who cares who gets charged? Mrs. Anna Dolmage Londesboro. Letters must be signed Last week we received an interesting letter to the editor on the subject of the current Ontario Provincial Election. Unfor­ tunately the letter was unsigned and there was no address or telephone number so that we could not contact the writer to let him/her know that it could not be published in that form. While we feel that all letters are most effective if the writer has the courage of his convictions to sign a name, we will publish a letter under a pseudonym but the letter must be signed by the writer and the telephone number must be included so we can confirm the writer actually did write the letter. We will withhold the name of those whc wish it not to be published but we will reveal the name to those people directly effected by the letter. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 1990. PAGE 5. Letter from the editor Gruesome reading opens eyes BY KEITH ROULSTON On August 6, the 25th anniversary of the first time an atomic bomb was used against human beings there was a brave attempt in a television movie to tell of the horrors of atomic war by telling the story of some of the victims of the bombing through their eyes. I wonder how many people managed to make it through that two-hour horror show. I hope a lot of people did even though there was certainly nothing to enjoy about the program on that care-free Civic Holiday evening. Probably few people could sto­ mach the grotesque damage to people portrayed. For a generation that has lived most of its life under the shadow of nuclear destruction, we know little about the specifics of nuclear war. We deal in the abstract, the idea the entire earth could be destroyed, yet we’ve seldom been confron­ ted with the reality of the effects on real people. The first time I ever had my eyes opened in this way was when 1 picked up an old book a few years ago and had the most startling reading experience of my whole life. The book was a slim volume called simply “Hiroshima’’. It was written by John Hersey the acclaimed Second World War war correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for his novel “A Bell for Adano’’, about a little Italian town under American occupation. Hersey had managed to get into Hiro­ shima soon after the surrender of Japan to the Americans and in a series of articles for New Yorker magazine, he talked to the people who had survived the blast and recorded, before memories could fade or imagination could exaggerate, the experi­ ences they had. The book brought to me the feelings of horror and wonder of the event. The horror was there in the terrible things that happened to people. The wonder was there from the awesome power this man-made machine unleashed. Witnesses told of meeting people whose skin peeled off their arms like long gloves. They saw people whose eyeballs literally melted and ran down their faces. Hollywood’s makeup just couldn’t duplicate in that movie the true scale of the horror of that day. From a distance it was easy to say the Japanese people had brought this on themselves. It was Japan, after all, that attacked China and Korea, then Hawaii, Singapore, Hong Kong and the rest. But in reading Hersey’s book you get away from nationalities and get down to individuals. No matter how much you may have hated the Japanese, no matter how cruel some Japanese may have been to allied Prison­ ers of War, it’s impossible to think that anyone “deserves’’ this. With the elimination of the “Cold War’’ and the partial gearing down of the massive war machines of the Soviet Union and the United States, the traditional fear of the world suffering another Hiroshima seems to have diminished but in some ways the danger may be even worse. War between the two super powers was too terrible to contemplate with each country having several times over the ability to destroy every living thing on earth. No matter how each side distrusted the other there was a respect for the destructive ability these leaders possessed. But there are other players in the nuclear field, some who don’t have the same sense of responsibility. Saddam Hussein has been rumoured at times to be close to developing Iraq’s first atomic bomb. Would he be any less likely to unleash its power than he was to use chemical warfare against his enemies in Iran? India and Pakistan, often bitter enemies, both appear to have the bomb. Israel likely has it and as time goes on leaders of many countries may seek the ultimate in power to bolster their egos. I wish everyone in every country could Continued on page 6