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Media
Good old sex
Modern Maturity -- the largest-circulation magazine in America -- gets sexier as the baby boomers realize that 50 isn't old after all.
By Sean Elder
[09/01/99]

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Rag vs. rag
Skeptic magazine should take a cue from its splashier, diametric opposite, Fate. Plus: Jerry Stahl on heroin -- again; yet another writer "discovers" eBay.
By Jenn Shreve
[08/27/99]

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Therapy is painless
From Freud to divorce court: A therapist to meet your every need. Plus: Dan Savage vs. the Republicans; Elvis' "black satin-like" pajamas on the auction block.
By Jenn Shreve
[08/20/99]

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The malling of America
Old Navy and Starbucks and Jamba Juice! Oh my! Plus: Feed looks at the latest trend in computer interfaces.
By Jenn Shreve
[08/13/99]

Media
Names that live in infamy
Killers want notoriety. Let's not give it to them.
By David Brin
[08/13/99]

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But in a 30-second ad, anything can be alleged. By the time the respondent responds, days or even weeks have gone by. And of course, the natural reaction is to mount counter-attacks that are also immune to scrutiny. The net result for the viewer is an endless assault of shrill, demeaning finger-pointing. Congress on "Jerry Springer."

Don't kid yourself. Even as we take great delight in getting rid of suits in the office, there is a feeling that the institutions that make up the steel girders of our society are cracking. We can live with the fact that our politicians are, after all, just human beings. But can we survive if we force them to mud-wrestle to keep their jobs?

In commenting about a barrage of Democratic commercials, Kenneth T. Walsh wrote this in U.S. News: "The commercials have succeeded in painting the Republicans as extremists. But the negative barrage also has intensified cynicism about all politics, leaving many voters not so much angry toward Washington as feeling it is irrelevant."

He went on to say: "Studies indicate that attack advertising breeds such disgust among moderate voters that many do not vote at all. If the current scorched-earth campaign continues, the November election could be dominated by die-hards and ideologues while centrists stay home."

This is the real danger. Not that we might elect a bonehead or two; heck, good government needs boneheads. Say what you might about Joe McCarthy, you're probably not going to see blacklists in Hollywood again. (At least not about being communist. About being involved in making the "Blair Witch Project," perhaps, but not about being a communist.) No, the real danger is that by maintaining a methodology that rewards video veneer and violence of voice, we encourage a huge amount of self-interest money to finance a hissy fit. The result is disdain for everyone in the arena. Raise your hand for election and sure, you might start out as a hero: Mr. Hobbs goes to Washington. But I guarantee you that two weeks into the contest, you've become a self-sniffing, pocket-stuffing progress-stopper bent on screwing the voter out of rights, wallet, safety and any chance of keeping a job. And just wait till you're the incumbent, you slug.

No wonder the next generation of voters is changing the channel. In "A Politics For Generation X," in the August 1999 Atlantic Monthly, Ted Halstead cites Gary Ruskin, "an Xer who directs the Congressional Accountability Project, a public-policy group in Washington, D.C.," who says "Republicans and Democrats have become one and the same -- they are both corrupt at the core and behave like children who are more interested in fighting with each other than in getting anything accomplished."

Halstead doesn't refer specifically to political advertising, but he does cite some dire statistics that to me indicate some of the damage we're doing to ourselves: "Voting rates are arrestingly low among post-Boomers. In the 1994 midterm elections, for instance, fewer than one in five eligible Xers showed up at the polls. As recently as 1972 half those aged eighteen to twenty-four voted; in 1996, a presidential-election year, only 32 percent did. Such anemic participation can be seen in all forms of traditional political activity; Xers are considerably less likely than previous generations of young Americans to call or write elected officials, attend candidates' rallies, or work on political campaigns."

As an ad guy, the first thing I'd say to the Founding Fathers if they called me in for a brand revitalization is that the current brand managers have screwed it up royally. Instead of sending out messages about values, performance and quality, they've blown the brand's goodwill bank account on sense-off coupons to get themselves elected. It's time we made them behave.

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