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
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