Did you ever see Creepshow? It was a horror movie made up of about 5 short stories all tied together with a comic book theme. Anyway, one of the stories was called "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" and starred Stephen King. It was about a guy who finds a meteor leaking some strange liquid, and when he gets some on him, it turns out to be some kind of super miracle grow stuff that begins growing green weeds on him and on everything he touches. It's a pretty depressing story while trying to be humorous, and in the end, overgrown with these weeds the guy kills himself. Why bring this up? Because I'm reading a book right now which made me think of something else that is an awful lot like those weeds. The book is No Logo and the revelations in it about the growth of advertising and its ever-intrusive nature reminded me of those weeds. I was reading about how advertising has made its way into our schools, and two stories really jumped out at me. Have a gander at these:
During the 1997-98 academic year, elementary school students in more than eight hundred classrooms across the U.S. sat down at their desks to find that today's lesson was building a Nike sneaker, complete with a swoosh and an endorsement from an NBA star. Called a "despicable use of classroom time" by the National Education Association and "the warping of education" by the Consumers Union, the make-your-own-Nike exercise purports to raise awareness about the company's environmentally sensitive production process. Nike's claim to greenness relies heavily on the fact that the company recycles old sneakers to re-cover community centre basketball courts, which, in a post-modern marketing spiral, it then brands with the Nike swoosh.
If that one isn't bad enough, get a load of this story:
In 1998 Coca-Cola ran a competition asking several schools to come up with a strategy for distributing Coke coupons to students. The school that devised the best promotional strategy would win $500. Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, took the contest extremely seriously, calling an official Coke Day in late March during which all students came to school in Coca-Cola T-shirts, posed for a photograph in a formation spelling Coke, attended lectures given by Coca-Cola executives and learned about all things black and bubbly in their classes. It was a little piece of branding heaven until it came to the principal's attention that in an act of hideous defiance, one Mike Cameron, a nineteen-year-old senior, had come to school wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo. He was promptly suspended for the offence. "I know it sounds bad ó 'Child suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on Coke Day,'" said principal Gloria Hamilton. "It really would have been acceptable...if it had just been in-house, but we had the regional president here and people flew in from Atlanta to do us the honor of being resource speakers. These students knew we had guests."
Now I don't know about you guys, but this kind of shit pisses me off. This is the world we live in, and it's all been sold off without our authorization, and largely without our knowledge to boot. Sometimes I feel like I want to go to the middle of nowhere, where I can not be bombarded with people and/or companies trying to sell me stuff. Depressing, isn't it? 