Three Short Pieces
Bumper Sticker Self-Expression
For many people today, communicating “who they are” consists in purchasing the right bumper sticker, and affixing it to their vehicle. Same with greeting cards – just pick one you like, and give it to that special person. As if self-expression were some sort of multiple choice exercise.
Sell Your Soul at the Old Ball Game
The Knicks were in town to play the Nuggets and my son Lionel took me to the game for my birthday. The spectacle at the “Pepsi Center” was nothing but shameless, automated, heartless marketing. Robotic cheers led by electronic scoreboards, giveaway promotions on the loudspeaker, and live “cheerleaders” doing their schticky little dance numbers which were obviously timed to precisely fit the TV commercial breaks. (And they did the exact same routine at least a dozen times during the game.) Trinkets thrown into the audience. Everything completely slick. And the fans didn’t seem to know that they were being fundamentally, royally disrespected.
No Package Goods
When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, bars could be open on Sundays but they couldn’t sell “package goods,” i.e. alcoholic drinks in bottles or cans to take out. However they were allowed to sell draft beer “to go” in these rather large white cardboard cups with white cardboard slide-on lids.
Draft beer doesn’t take well to the confines of a cardboard cup. On multiple occasions I remember riding home in the back seat of our car with a paper bag of 2-3 cardboard cups foaming beer onto the floor. It happened every time.
How could we have created and tolerated a system of laws that had us spilling beer into our cars?
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