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Mr.
Popeil’s Pitch and…
Government, like that
most unlikely of promoters, tickled your fancy, but now you may be bored and
having sampled your fill of everything that didn’t satisfy, you might have
found yourself watching the government dog and pony show which seems to be on
twenty-four-seven but never accomplishes what previous generations of elected
officials did when many feared that death was a heaven or hell reality. Fear
like that seems to be out of style, or has perhaps been supplanted by the fear
that those reality stars that people admire may be out of their league.
I grew up in a simpler
time when a television pitch was a paid-for advertisement delivered late at
night to those sleepless few who wanted to be entertained. Many who stayed up
then will remember the Mr. Popeil pitch commercials, where for a modest price
one could buy the new handy-dandy gadget Mr. Popeil had invented, and many did!
No one expected those gadgets to last very long. Yet years after the inventor
died, his Chop-O-Matic hand food processor was still going strong. In fact, so
great was this one man’s ingenuity and pitch lingo that Mr. Popeil has become
an American pop icon. Some may have thought he was a laugh riot, but this one
man redefined the idea of ‘make it, promote it, and they’ll buy it!’
Since I mentioned Sci-Fi
you might think I’ve visited and am speaking about the other America depicted
in one of the original episodes of the Star Trek TV shows. Although the
possibility that two Americas could exist in some space-time continuum might be
used by some to negate what I have written, I can assure you, that the United
States of America I am writing about is the one that believed so strongly that
God ‘shed His grace’ upon our country, that a unified Congress put forth a bill
and on July 30, 1965 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed that bill which added
the words ‘One Nation Under God’ to our nation’s Pledge of Allegiance. Today
those very words are being demonized because the government wants us to trust
and depend upon them.
Never before in the
history of our country have the very people who elected their representatives
had so much to fear from those appointed to serve. Today we are caught on the
horns of a dilemma. Not since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the Civil War
that tore our nation apart have ‘We, The People’ faced such perilous times. Yet
there is not a cry to unite, instead our nation’s leaders debate, postpone,
retreat and moan at every opportunity that the issues cannot be resolved. Since
no resolution leads to stagnation, lethargy, and finally acceptance, I cannot
condone the dog and pony show that robs us and future generations of the
freedoms we were granted because courageous men took a stand.
If you wonder who I have
written this for, I am writing for myself, for those who long to be free, for
those who see the last vestiges of what we used to be trampled asunder as we
conform to someone else’s idea of a social norm. I write for those, like me,
who have walked the winding road of life, observed and edited their thoughts,
actions, responses, and reactions with the changing times and have ended up
here. You may well ask where exactly where here is, and that is, I believe a
very good question indeed. Suffice it to say, here is not the Fifties I lived
in, when I discovered through what the common vernacular came to be called the
Boob Tube, that neither the Beaver’s dad nor the Nelsons’ father went to work.
When I watched these shows, which became for many like me the lens through
which we would view life, every issue was neatly dealt with in thirty minutes,
which is very unlike the Congress we have today. Getting back to the TV shows
of yesteryear, I must mention that issues were dealt with in less than thirty
minutes because sponsors needed time to sell products like cereals that were
purported to float. However, if we had tested the claims of the advertisers,
and watched to see if the cereal would float, we might have noticed that given
enough time they sank to the bottom and became the icky gooey mess we thought
they would. Sadly, today the same litmus test applied to the Affordable Care
Act would show that like those ill-fated cereal, there is nothing affordable in
that bill. If it were, then the government would have made this Supreme Court
Mandated Law the law for everyone including Congress and unions.
If we had applied that
litmus test to other pitches, we most likely would have not bought a law
mandated by the Supreme Court because that is not one of their functions.
Furthermore, a law that was passed before it was read and debated by both
houses would have, if sent to a different group of sitting Supreme Court
Judges, been sent back to Congress, since this country was born from the
rallying cry, ‘No taxation without representation!’
Today Andy Warhol’s 1968
claim; ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes’, has more
people seeking recognition at any cost and fewer interested in what ‘We the
People’ have lost than ever before. Beware, for having bought into the idea
that the government can solve all ills, we may have thrown away what matters
most by borrowing against a legacy we believe we can never lose: like the
family farm, generations owned now auctioned off, so we could have whatever is
touted as necessary, and later discover it is anything but. Thus begins the
downward spiral of seeking a sort of notoriety that previous to the 1960’s was
to be avoided at all cost.
Of course all of this is
the history that no one ever talks or writes about, so why now? Good question!
And the answer is, why not now? For right now, we are living in a world of
pitches and smokescreens where every aberrant behavior is viewed as normal. And
normal behavior, the classic idea of the norm, that we were all taught to
admire, emulate, and seek after, and which many worked toward for eons, seems
to have left the building as surely as Elvis did. In fact, given the tenor of
these times, it might be apt to observe that the norm has left our political
arena, politicians, the press, our entertainers, though some of their behavior
drew glances way before now, and maybe even our country.
Now you might be
thinking this doesn’t matter to me! But it does! The world you live in matters
as much to you as the security of the Fifties matters to me. I grew up with
that feeling. It wasn’t until I received a radio alarm clock the year I turned
twelve that I heard about the Bay of Pigs and a guy named Batista. I rooted for
a man named Castro who would make it all better. In the infancy of my awareness
of the world outside, I learned that there are movements and individuals
throughout the world who have a slick pitch. If you don’t want to get suckered
in, stay tuned! http://amzn.to/WfYxaD
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