Month: March 2012

• School budgets are being cut in New York and everywhere else. In many schools, art lessons, music education and other non-core classes have been slashed and classes are too large.
• State governments are retreating from their long-term commitment to state supported universities and colleges. In the late 60s and early 70s, my tuition (paid for by a state of Wisconsin “Leadership and Need” scholarship) was $175 a semester to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus and learn from many inspiring scholars such as Davy Carozza, Corliss Philabaum and Ihab Hussan. Enough said there.
• More than 30 years of inadequate investment and maintenance have left our infrastructure of roads and bridges in a sorry state. We’ve seen bridges crumble and potholes seemingly multiply like rabbits. Of course, when we let roads deteriorate because taxes are too low, individuals end up paying more on tires, brakes, gas and realignments.
• In New York, mass transit cuts appear to be an irritant only, but in many other places such as Pittsburgh, transit cuts are hurting many people.

• What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years.” What Happer does is take a meaningless slice of time for climate change. If he looked at 200 years of data, he would see that the world is getting warmer. Making the last 10 years as the length of time in which to measure global warming uses a technique I call FRAMING, which occurs when you define a problem to get the answer you want.
• “CO2 is not a pollutant. Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels, and because warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated. Nations with affordable energy from fossil fuels are more prosperous and healthy than those without.” Let’s forget the fact that the life that existed on earth with much higher levels of CO₂ than today didn’t include humans or other large mammals. Let’s focus instead on the end of this paragraph, which is a NON SEQUITUR (which loosely means that it makes no sense or that A doesn’t really prove B): Although fossil fuels release CO₂ that does not mean that you can disprove the theory that too much CO₂ harms the Earth; it only means that cheap energy is necessary for nations to thrive.
• “The direct warming due to doubling CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be calculated to cause a warming of about one degree Celsius. The IPCC computer models predict a much larger warming, three degrees Celsius or even more, because they assume changes in water vapor or clouds that supposedly amplify the direct warming from CO2. Many lines of observational evidence suggest that this “positive feedback” also has been greatly exaggerated.” Note that Happer gives attribution for a computer model that predicts global warming, but does not tell which studies or computer simulations disprove it. He uses the passive construction to AVOID ATTRIBUTION. If he changed the passive “can be calculated to cause…” to an active tense, “XYZ calculates,” grammar would force him to tell us who did the calculations. Many lines of observational evidence…,” begs the question, “Which lines?” and also avoids telling us who is following, making or observing these “lines.” If you believe in this research, sir, tell us who did it? But if Happer told us who did this so-called research he cites, we might find that it’s shoddy, has already been discounted, makes framing mistakes, was done by non-scientists or isn’t really research. We don’t really know unless Happer offers the citations.
• “But there is no hard evidence this is true. After an unusually cold winter in 2011 (December 2010-February 2011) the winter of 2012 was unusually warm in the continental United States. But the winter of 2012 was bitter in Europe, Asia and Alaska.” Happer is ARGUING BY ANECDOTE. The argument by anecdote provides examples and assumes that we will extrapolate from those examples to the conclusion the writer or speaker wants us to draw. Happer talks about what has happened over the course of two years, when global warming is a process that has occurred over many decades; in this context, two years are only anecdotes, not statistically valid data.
• “Nightly television pictures of the tragic destruction from tornadoes over the past months might make one wonder if the frequency of tornadoes is increasing, perhaps due to the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. But as one can read at Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog, dotearth, ‘There is no evidence of any trend in the number of potent tornadoes (category F2 and up) over the past 50 years in the United States, even as global temperatures have risen markedly.'” The sentences I quote are the beginning of a multi-paragraph argument in which Happer proves without a doubt that the number of tornadoes have not increased in the United States (he never mentions the rest of the world). But who is saying it? I googled “tornadoes global warming” and could only come up with articles in which experts say that there has not been an increase in tornadoes. I could come up with articles in which experts say that there has not been an increase in tornadoes. I could come up with no article in which a scientist or a group has said that tornadoes have increased (except for a speculating weather personality or two trying to spice up coverage of a tornado). What Happer has done is set up a STRAW MAN, which means he creates an argument which is easy to destroy and then destroys it. And once again, he bases his argument on a NON SEQUITUR. He wants us to believe that just because there has not been an increase in tornadoes that there has been no global warming, nor damage from same. His reasoning is absurd, even if it builds on the idea that global warming will create more extreme weather. Extreme weather includes a lot more than tornadoes. I sense (but don’t know for a fact) that he selects tornadoes to discuss for precisely this reason, another example of FRAMING the argument to get the conclusion you want. Reduced to rhetorical principles, Happer frames the argument, then destroys a straw man, all so he can make a statement that’s a non sequitur.

Yesterday’s rally of atheists, agnostics and others who don’t believe in religion had a flavor of liberation politics. The tone of the language reported across the country and around the world resembled the kind of pleas for recognition that people of color, gays, women, Hispanics, people with disabilities, Moslems and other groups seeking their rights in society have issued through the years.

Sample these comments by speakers:

• “There are too many people in this country who have been cowed into fear of coming out as atheists, secularists or agnostics,” said Richard Dawkins, the British scientist whose ventures into pop science have unfortunately led to his misleading anthropomorphizing of chemicals in the body (i.e., he attributes emotions and goals to genetic material).
• “These are battles that homosexuals have won, people of color have won, women have won,” said Jamila Bey, who claims to have once lost a job when her boss learned she was an atheist.
• “We have the numbers to be taken seriously,” said Paul Fidalgo of the Center for Inquiry, which promotes the scientific method and reasoning and helped organize the rally.
• “Coming here makes me feel less alone,” said 13-year-old Catherine Williams, who attends a small conservative private school and is reported to have said that it can be uncomfortable because many of her classmates are vocal about their religious beliefs.

While discrimination against atheists for their beliefs may exist, lumping non-believers together as just another interest group may ultimately have a negative impact on achieving the goals that brought together the 20 groups and 15,000 people who rallied yesterday.

Here’s why: The social right-wing always pose religious issues as a battle between good and evil and the rest of the country hears it as a battle between two competing special interest groups, for example, women versus the Catholic Church. For both the right and the mainstream, religiously-tinged issues—contraception, abortion, gay marriage, crèches in public, religious groups in public schools and the teaching of evolution—are characterized as battles between two sides. Identifying a new special interest group—nonbelievers—intensifies this tendency towards polarization.

And yet the Constitution is clear: there should be an absolute separation of church and state and all individuals should have the right to practice his or her own religion, assuming it doesn’t break the basic laws of the land, e.g., mutilation of children or marrying more than one wife. By presenting themselves as an oppressed group, nonbelievers buy into the “us versus them” mentality created by the opposition of special interests. The media and society then both take it upon themselves to “balance the needs” of the competing groups, when in fact there should not be a competition or a balancing at all, since we are officially a secular country.

In short, by assuming the mantle of a special interest group, nonbelievers turn the story into a battle between atheists and the God-fearing. That plays right into the hands of social conservatives. The issue transforms from right-wingers against the Constitution into believers versus nonbelievers.

Instead of pleading for recognition as a group, the rally should have focused more on the key issues which I believe unite all those who don’t believe in religion:

• National science standards that would insure that we teach science in science classes, while leaving religious theories such as intelligent design for elective comparative religion courses in high school.
• National environmental, energy and other policies that are determined and implemented based on scientific studies.
• Standards of conduct that would ensure that proselytization of one religion never again becomes the unofficial policy of a branch of the armed services as it did to a certain extent in the Air Force for years.

These policy issues, by the way, should unite atheists, agnostics and secularists with most Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, Animists, Pantheists, Wiccans and all brands of Christians. In an open society all religious groups can thrive, as none are either oppressed or treated with any special deference.  Let’s focus our efforts on keeping our society as open as it is and opening it more. We don’t do it by conceptualizing oppressed groups. That only helps the right-wing legitimize itself and feeds the news media’s predilection to polarize instead of analyze. Instead, I urge nonbelievers to put their energies into the issues.

I’m not saying that nonbelievers shouldn’t organize, only that they should organize around issues and thus avoid becoming the “counter-balance” to believers.

With the Supreme Court considering multiple challenges to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 next week, OpEdge readers might want to delve into the long-term history of health care reform in the United States. If so, there is no better place to go than Paul Starr’s recent Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Struggle over Health Care Reform, which traces health care reform from the earliest proposals for government-sponsored health insurance just before and during World War I.

Starr is without a doubt the guy to tackle the subject. Since its 1984 publication, his Social Transformation of American Medicine has become established not just as the seminal work in the narrow field of health care, but as one of the very most important books of American social history. Since then, Starr has taught, conducted historical research into both health care and the media and served as a senior health care advisor for Bill Clinton. He is co-editor of The American Prospect.

Here are some of the insights that I gleaned from reading Remedy and Reaction:

A lost golden moment

There was a golden moment when all the stars were aligned for a major overall of the healthcare system which would have ensured that virtually every American had healthcare insurance. Both Republicans and Democrats pretty much agreed on what to do, the various constituencies such as insurers, physicians and the public were either on board or not opposed and the president in charge supported the idea and knew how to get things done. Unfortunately, the president was Richard Nixon and a potentially watershed moment drowned in the Watergate scandal.

Mitt Romney’s important role

Starr documents that the Affordable Care Act is profoundly the child of the successful Massachusetts plan that Governor Mitt Romney competently shepherded to passage and then efficiently implemented. The federal plan is derived from the same philosophy and using pretty much the same set of strategies and tactics as the Massachusetts plan.  Starr also points out that Romney did not talk about healthcare reform during his gubernatorial campaign, but once in office he rolled up his sleeves and displayed enormous competence. Starr doesn’t say it, but I will: the Romney disavowal of his landmark accomplishment strongly suggests that Mitt is a value-free technocrat whose idea of being in charge is to implement competently the desires of his backers, whatever that means. By repudiating his own good works, Romney transforms himself from a major statesman to the ethical equivalent of an Albert Speer, that wonderfully brilliant architect and thinker who dedicated himself to accomplishing the will of his backers.

Not a socialist plot

Starr shows that the basic philosophy behind Obama’s plan from the beginning has been to cover more people and cut the cost of coverage while taking a pragmatic approach that does not profoundly upset the current complicated system that mixes public and private solutions and funding sources. Its dependence on private insurance and patient cost sharing derive from Republican ideas. So is the idea of not creating a “public option,” but instead establishing insurance exchanges, which are marketplaces for insurance for those not covered by government programs or their employers.

Like all compromises, there is something for everyone to hate and love about the Affordable Care Act. But Starr, who would probably have preferred a more European style system, brings up a stunning fact that should win the day with many centrists and progressives: The impact over Obama’s healthcare reform over 10 years will be to increase total healthcare costs in the United States by a worst-case 1 percent, while providing coverage to 32 million more people, or a little over 10% of the American population. By that math, the cost per person for health care goes down, which means that by applying some quick fixes to the current system, we cover many more people and at a lower cost.

It’s an imperfect law that doesn’t address all the challenges of perfecting an imperfect system, but it is nevertheless landmark legislation. Let’s hope the most right-wing Supreme Court since the Dred Scott days agrees.

The core of Romney’s big speech in Chicago yesterday was his accusation that the Obama Administration has pursued “an assault on freedom” with new business regulations and higher taxes.

The expression freedom is bandied about a lot, especially by Republicans bewailing its imminent loss—economic freedom, personal freedom, religious freedom. But what about freedom from breathing dirty air? The freedom from hunger? The freedom from economic insecurity? The freedom from disease?

We can pose both sides of most issues as a test of freedom. In the days of the civil rights movement, it was the freedom to sit in a restaurant versus the freedom to deny service in a business establishment.  The current flap about contraception pits the freedom of women versus the freedom of a religion to discriminate against women.

Of course, the more we apply the word “freedom,” the more it loses all meaning. And that’s the point!

The value of any word to a propagandist or ideologue increases as the meaning of the word becomes more amorphous, harder to pin down.  And there is no more amorphous word than freedom.

The first definition of freedom in Merriam-Webster’s is “the quality or state of being free: the quality or state of not being coerced or constrained by fate, necessity, or circumstances in one’s choices or actions.” The entry, however, goes on for many paragraphs and gives many different meanings to the word. The synonyms for freedom, some contradictory, suggest how easy it is for propagandists to find a meaning to fit the moment: “self-determination,” “independence,” “liberty,” “facility,” “ease”,” right,” “privilege,” “franchise,” and even “generosity” (which is not the essence of the freedom from taxation that Romney would like America’s wealthiest to continue enjoying).  Then there’s Kris Kristofferson’s definition, made famous by Janis Joplin: another word for nothing left to lose.

One anecdote on the use of freedom outside the political realm should illuminate the power of words that lose meaning. A few years ago at a family Bat Mitzvah in California, the rabbi performing the service said in his sermon that “Torah is freedom. The more Torah, the more freedom.”

It was of course, a completely false statement. The Torah, which comprises the first five books of the Jewish Bible, does include many well-loved biblical stories and all of the ones told by Jews, Christians and Moslems alike. But the Torah is primarily a book of laws, 613 to be precise, whose purpose is to restrain the behavior of people, i.e., take away their freedom.  Thou shall not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. These are the birds you should regard as unclean. According to the Jewish tradition, the Torah is the source for every Jewish law, even those not mentioned in it. That includes all the laws that take away freedoms related to eating, traveling and mixing the sexes in social situations.

These laws take freedom away from people. The more Torah, the less freedom. And yet so many of the congregants smiled in agreement when the rabbi equated a book of mostly proscriptive laws with freedom.

Whether he knew it or not, the rabbi was using yet another definition of freedom. Freedom is also that feeling of supreme exhilaration and limitless power that people describe as “feeling free.” I remember when I was much younger and religious, I would sometimes read the Torah and get a sudden feeling of being free, like the feeling when I used to take my feet off the pedals and glide my bicycle down a steep hill, or the feeling when I quit one job for another one that paid 36% more. Many TV commercials will say their products help attain this “feeling of freedom.”

From kindergarten on, we are indoctrinated to the importance of freedom and “the feeling of freedom” at school and in the mass media. We are taught that the United States was founded to promote freedom (at the time, of course, only for white adult males who owned property) and that the United States is a beacon of freedom to the world. One of the major themes in our history is the gradual spread of freedom through increased freedom for our citizens and in the foreign lands that the myth says we have saved. We claim that every war we fight is to protect our freedom or the freedom of the people whose land we are invading, or both.  Thinking about American freedom can swell the chests of many of us with an almost swooning pride. We have learned to feel the “freedom feeling” whenever we consider our history, culture and laws.

It is this definition of freedom—this feeling—to which Romney appeals when he talks about economic freedom. When he says the policies of his party will increase freedom, he wants people’s hearts to swell with the feeling of freedom and then recoil with the fear at the thought of lost freedom because of environmental regulation, healthcare reform or raising taxes on the wealthy. He never mentions that his tax freedom results in less money for society to help people be free from disease, from ignorance, from hunger, from the helplessness of old age and from the frustration of poverty. He never mentions that his freedom from regulation makes people less free from business scams, unsafe products, dirty air and infectious water.

Many philosophers believe that the essence of civilization is restraint. Learning restraint—limiting your freedom for your future good, the good of others or the common good—is at the heart of the process of growing up from infancy into a mature member of society.

Romney and the rest of the Republicans don’t really want absolute freedom in the economic realm. They just believe that our laws should protect the rights of individuals and organizations to do as they please (outside the sexual realm) as opposed to protecting the rights of people to have the basic human dignities of food, health care, education and the opportunity to make a living and improve their lot. Those who say that unfettered economic freedom enables more people to enjoy all the other freedoms are merely expressing their beliefs, which they constantly and inaccurately present as a fact-based theory. History, however, is filled of examples of how taking away an economic freedom—the freedom to hire children, the freedom to dump toxic chemicals into rivers, the freedom to charge what you like because you have a monopoly, the freedom to pay someone less than minimum wage or the freedom to prevent union organizing—has improved society and helped the economy.  It’s one set of rights versus another.  We can also call them freedoms, but  once we do, the concept of freedom loses its meaning.

In the realm of political campaigning, “freedom” has become something one accuses the opponent of not loving/having/protecting/cherishing. With name-calling, we say, “you’re this,” but freedom in the Republican’s sense is conjured only in its absence as a characteristic. Saying the opponent or the idea is against freedom is a highly sophisticated form of name-calling, dependent not just on conflating different concepts of freedom, but also on a body of unproved assertions and an almost autonomic emotional reaction.

But emotions aside, keep it in mind that when Romney says the election is about freedom, he means the freedom of the economic and social class he represents to continue pulling more and more wealth from everyone else through continued low taxes for themselves and low wages and declining government benefits for everyone else.

For the first time ever, the fast food version of Siva the Destroyer, AKA McDonald’s, is going after senior citizens—and I don’t mean newly AARPed 50-year-olds, but those in their late 70s and early 80s.

I saw this commercial for the first time during one of the many breaks during the last two minutes of an NCAA tournament game this past weekend.

The commercial unfolds as a series of vignettes, with quick fade-outs and fade-ins to tell us that it’s another day of the week. In each vignette, the same two elderly gentlemen—one bald–stare at what a former employee of mine once called a “senior babe,” an extremely attractive woman in her late 60s or early 70s. They make juvenile comments about how the bald one wants to go over and try to meet her. As far as attracting the attention of unknown members of the opposite sex goes, these guys don’t seem as if they’re out of practice, but rather as if they never really were in practice.

In every vignette, the would-be lover, his intended and the friend are drinking coffee or a special McDonald’s coffee drink—you know, sweetened coffee topped with a pyramid of white whipped froth consisting of corn syrup and dairy products, topped by a few rivulets of a thicker, less airy corn syrup tinted with food coloring and a roux of natural and artificial flavorings. They’re called McCafé drinks.

In the last vignette the potential suitor arrives at the table wearing an awful fitting toupee which transforms him into a pathetic clown. Meanwhile a bearded man, looking slightly younger and spryer than the toupéed jester, approaches the senior babe.  Brandishing his McCafé drink as a peacock shows his tail, he asks if he can sit at her table. Her eyes light up and they begin an animated conversation. We cut back to the two oldest adolescent males in the jungle. The friend says the would-be lothario should have put the wig on his chin instead of his head. Before the McDonald’s music and logo, the scorned lover mugs pathetically with the toupee in a way that made me feel embarrassed for and angry at the guy at the same time.

What do we learn from this commercial?

We learn that senior centers, libraries, venues for volunteer activities, dances, houses of worship and family gatherings are not the best places to meet women when you are of a certain age. Instead, you have to hang at Mickey D’s on a regular basis. Of course, that’s a completely false impression. True enough, there must be groups of seniors who use McDonald’s to meet and schmooze once a week, or maybe every day. But what happens in this commercial is slightly different. It’s hanging at Mickey D’s to hook up. And what I’m saying is that the scene rings more false than cute because there are so many better places for seniors to meet and match nowadays.

We also learn in this commercial that the relationship marketplace for straight men in their 70s and 80s is pretty grim. In a turnaround of Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” (to which these characters would have probably danced decades ago), it’s three boys for every girl. Of course, that’s false, too. Death and illness give men the numbers advantage when it comes to late-in-life love. The older the age group, the more eligible women there are per eligible man. Neither Target nor Wal-Mart would ever commit such a demographic sin in one of their commercials. When they depict a demographic group in an ad, everything is right in every detail.

Target and Wal-Mart would also never make mean fun of its customers, although they both will “make fun with” their customers, as McDonald’s has also done through the years. “Making fun with” includes such scenes as the wife letting the husband think he’s making the buying decision; the couple arguing about what to do with the savings they have from buying something; the kids trying to use smart phone technology to trick dad into buying more treats. These are gentle teases which affirm the attractiveness of the target audiences. But depicting an octogenarian as an infantilized Pagliacci is inherently insulting to the characters and by implication to the demographic they represent, which is why the scene seems more uncomfortable than cute, despite the peppy McDonald’s “ba-da-da-da-da” playing brightly in the background.

The irony is that whoever worked on this spot started with the right ideas. McDonald’s strategy to go after senior citizens is a good one, since the original denizens of Big Macs are baby boomers now retiring and aging.

To connect the consumption of a product with an emotion is a staple strategy of advertising, one that McDonald’s has pursued with a vengeance for decades, especially in spots featuring African-Americans and young adults. And as we have seen in many McDonald’s spots through the years, what better emotion can there be than romantic attraction? Moreover, one unifying theme shared by all McDonald’s spots for specialty coffee drinks over the past few years is an attitude best described as hip cuteness, and what could be cuter and hipper at the same time than seniors in love?

On paper, the spot has it all: It connects a product to an emotion, focuses on a target market that is of growing importance, and has thematic and design similarities with other McDonald’s spots that will help enhance the overall brand message that the company tries to make in all of its advertising.

Somewhere along the way, though, these strategies led to the uncomfortable and unrealistic mess we see in the commercial. Because it presents a reality that doesn’t exist and one in which the representative of the target market is humiliated, I’m certain that the commercial will fail with that target market.

But I’m betting it plays well with the enormous youth market for coffee drinks, i.e., the young and slightly unsophisticated who will accept the McCafé drink as a cheaper substitute for a beverage from a real coffee house or that corporate imitation known as Starbucks. The humor is a highly sanitized version of the crude and somewhat humiliating humor of a lot of youth movies. Young men and women can relate to the awkward dilemma of a boy wanting to pick up a girl in a fast food restaurant but being afraid to ask.

And there can be no doubt about it. That’s not Viagra or water from the mythic fountain of youth that the bearded elderly gentleman has in his hand that makes him so attractive to the senior babe. It’s a McCafé! The elixir of love.

It seems as if it were only yesterday that I first saw the new TV commercial starring Mean Joe Greene, a professional football player from the 1970s. The commercial, for a laundry detergent, parodies a TV spot that Mean Joe did in 1979 that makes all the lists of top 10 or Top 25 American TV commercials of all time.

In the new spot, it’s a housewife, played to soccer-and-bake-sale-mom-next-door perfection by sometimes raunchy comic actress Amy Sedaris. The camera angle exaggerates the difference in size between the characters much more than the original spot did.  The housewife tosses a bottle of the detergent to Mean Joe, dressed in uniform and looking very sharp and buff—for a guy in his mid-60’s.  When Mean Joe lobs his jersey to her, she smells it, makes a disgusted face and throws it right back to him.

A great spoof.

TV commercials have spoofed TV shows, movies and other art forms for decades. And parody sometimes enters into the revival of an old ad concept like Mr. Clean, Joe Isuzu or Charlie the Tuna, which are all cases of a TV commercial imitating itself.

This laundry soap commercial marks the first time, however, that I remember seeing a television commercial that mocks another television commercial for a different product.  (If I’m wrong, please tweet me about it.)

What does it say about our culture when to understand and appreciate a television commercial, you need to know about another television commercial? One that’s 30 years old!

Mass culture chews up images and concepts quickly—be it fictional characters like Robin Hood, Mr. Spock or Jason Bourne; historical figures such as the short Napoleon or Washington crossing the Delaware; sayings like “where’s the beef?” or “I’ll be back”; real incidents like the Spitzer scandal; fictional ones like movie plots; or new products, especially strange ones. Situation comedies, comedy sketches, TV commercials, spoof movies, newspaper headlines, catalogue captions, advertising slogans, postmodern art and book titles are just some of the communication forms that cannibalize cultural references.

Cannibalization of cultural iconography occurs in many ways: Over time, we expropriate and distort the content of a cultural icon, as when Robin Hood becomes an anti-tax conservative or Martin Luther King comes to represent general service to the community. We make references to cultural icons, as when James Joyce structures Ulysses after Homer’s epic or when a secondary character in the “American Pie” movies calls himself the “Sherminator.” We morph them, as when the Terminator and Joe Isuzu become good guys. We take them out of context and thereby change their meaning, as Andy Warhol did with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

The surest sign that an event, person, character or saying has permanently entered the public collective consciousness is that it has undergone a large number of these and other processes of cultural expropriation over years. It’s one thing for Johnny Carson to make fun of the Mean Joe Greene soft drink commercial in 1982. It’s quite another to recycle the concept as a homage-cum-parody 30 years later to sell suds to housewives whose ages range from 30-65.

What would they say, those like Harold Bloom who put together lists of the great literature and other cultural artifacts with which every culturally literate person should be familiar? At first glance, you might think that they would probably frown dyspeptically at the symbolism of a TV commercial becoming as much a part of our cultural heritage as Huckleberry Finn or the founding of Jamestown.

To do so would be to stake out new ground in the culture wars. For centuries, the argument has been between high and low culture, between Latin versus the vernacular, painting versus pottery, Beethoven versus folk songs and the Beach Boys. But a television commercial is something different from both high culture and low culture. It represents commercial culture, and the cultural dictators of all ages, especially the conservative ones, have tended to warmly embrace commercial culture. The Aeneid, a piece of propaganda purchased by the Roman Emperor Augustus, makes all the lists of the cultural essentials. We see poster advertisements by Toulouse-Lautrec, the Russian Constructivists, Depero and others hanging in art museums all over the world. Why not a TV ad?

Rather than speculate on whether the Mean Joe Greene laundry soap commercial marks a watershed in what defines cultural literacy, let’s have a little fun by imagining commercials in which the following well-known fictional ad characters pitched these other products. I’m not going to sketch out the commercials, only the characters and products.  I think everyone can use their imagination:

So imagine if these four characters—Mikey who will try anything; the slimy Joe Isuzu; that little old lady shouting “Where’s the beef?” and Madge the wise and practical manicurist…

…were  in their typical TV spot environments, but selling any of the following products—hospital systems; fast food; Wal-Mart; potato chips; financial planning; beer; or prescription drugs, say for depression or erectile dysfunction.

I especially like Madge recommending a beer and Mikey trying Cymbalta. Joe Isuzu shilling a hospital isn’t bad either.

After I wondered the other day why those against health insurance covering birth control for women make no such objection to coverage of erectile dysfunction pills, several people tweeted me to uncover what they think is a fatal flaw in my argument: ED pills treat a medical condition, whereas birth control does not.

Medical condition versus no medical condition: At the heart of this distinction by those opposed to birth control for women is the idea that health insurance should not cover preventive medicine, such as annual physicals, mammograms, colonoscopies, Pap smears, mole removals, vaccines and dental check-ups. None of these tests or procedures cure anything, only prevent conditions or prevent them from becoming fatal. Imagine how much more suffering there would be in the world if polio and small pox were still running rampant through the world, or if the many early stage and pre-cancerous conditions were not caught.

To say that medical care and health insurance have as their sole goal to cure ailments is just wrong. Medicine and health insurance also prevent ailments.

The birth of a child is a wonderful thing, but only if the child is wanted. Pregnancy is always fraught with risks for both mother and child. Often women have ailments or disabilities that increase those risks to the point that pregnancy would be life-threatening. Those risks multiply for the child in unwanted pregnancies and can continue throughout childhood and beyond. Unwanted pregnancies can also lead to abortions, which, while not usually dangerous if performed under proper medical supervision, are objectionable to many people. To deny that birth control is part of preventive care requires ignoring a slew of data on women’s health issues.

Health insurers and medical professionals are always trying to figure out what and how many preventive tests, procedures and examinations are needed to keep people healthy while minimizing the unnecessary. After what must have been many studies repeatedly analyzed, most agree that covering birth control is worth the cost because it lowers total medical costs and prevents the pain and suffering of many unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

Now the other side will say that there’s another way to prevent pregnancies and unwanted abortion, the “little white aspirin pill between the knees” method, AKA abstinence. They ask, why make society pay for the personal decision to engage in sex? And of course, the same question can be asked about ED pills.

And so those opposed to coverage of birth control pills are left with a dilemma:

• Loudly oppose coverage of ED pills (since to engage in sex is a matter of personal choice) or admit they have a double standard

OR

• Come out against coverage of all preventive medicine.

Somehow I don’t think either will happen.

Republicans have latched onto the “birth control coverage” issue because they think they can use it to make other messages that will resonate with the right-wing. The overt messages have to do with government interference, especially as it involves health care, and the role of religion in the government and society. The subtext, though, entails some old-fashioned and wrong-headed ideas about the role of women in society.