Presidential candidates have the opportunity to set the national agenda by bringing forward new proposals and innovative policies.
Some do this: Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000. Others don’t. Like most or all of the 2008 candidates.
Click through their websites, and what you find is pretty thin gruel. Especially so from the two leading in the polls. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s homepage links to her recent Senate speech on Iran, but not her 2002 speech backing the Iraq war resolution. She calls for putting “some of the oil industry’s windfall profits into a fund that would help develop practical new sources of renewable energy,” but with no details. You might find out more by clicking on her “Let the Conversation Begin” webcasts.
Rudy Giuliani tells you even less. His exploratory-committee website has an account of his work as mayor of New York. But I could find nothing on what he would do as president. John McCain’s website makes some interesting points. As president, he would “use the veto pen” on pork and earmarks.
The section on “human dignity and the sanctity of life” mentions his opposition to abortion for many years and to funding embryonic-stem-cell research: a reminder to cultural conservatives that he’s been on their side, though he has seldom talked about it. For Iraq, he wants a “more robust counterinsurgency strategy” — which seems to be underway now.
Barack Obama ’s issue positions seem to be taken more or less intact from his senatorial Website. He cites his work with various Republican senators on important issues. He wants government to assume domestic autoworkers’ healthcare costs if they invest half in fuel-efficient technology, and he promises more “resources” to teachers: something for the United Auto Workers and the teachers unions.
John Edwards provides more detail. He wants withdrawal from Iraq “within 12-18 months,” plus direct talks with Iran and Syria, and a regional peace conference. Would Israel be invited? Variety reported (and Edwards denied) that he told a Hollywood crowd an attack by Israel on Iran was the greatest threat to world peace. He calls for universal health insurance through requiring employer coverage, expanding Medicaid, “reform(ing) insurance” and restricting drug ads. Eliminating poverty, his trademark theme in 2004, gets one paragraph. Mitt Romney has an Issue Watch tab, with single-paragraph discussions of eight issues and multiple recent Romney quotes. He calls for “address(ing) entitlement programs” and universal health insurance “through market reforms.” Single-digit candidates’ websites vary. Mike Huckabee has a four-word slogan and a YouTube link. Duncan Hunter discusses border security, trade, and the war on terrorism. Joe Biden has a few paragraphs on ten issues (with Afghanistan and Darfur treated as one issue). Chris Dodd identifies six issues but has single paragraphs on only four so far. Jim Gilmore reports on his record as governor of Virginia. John Cox, a Chicago-area accountant who ran for the Senate in 2004, wants lower spending, calls global warming “overblown” and stresses his opposition to abortion.
Some offer more. Bill Richardson invites you to sign a petition for diplomacy with Iran and has one-paragraph takes on seven issues. Dennis Kucinich’s front page is mostly about Iraq but has links to long comments on 10 issues, from healthcare to the Patriot Act. Mike Gravel highlights his opposition to the Iraq war and his proposals for national initiative elections. Sam Brownback mentions issues he’s taken the lead on (human rights, Darfur) and calls for a $5,000 tax credit for rural first-time homebuyers. Tom Tancredo starts with immigration, his signature issue, but provides some detail on ten others (he’s for a flat tax or national sales tax).
Yes, it’s early yet. The candidates haven’t had time to get issue shops up and running. Clinton and Bush got started much later in the 1992 and 2000 cycles. But so far, candidates have told us very little about where they think the world is headed and what we should do about it. And they’ve shown us little to indicate that they’ve thought seriously about governance and long-term problems like Social Security and Medicare.
Let’s hope they do better as they make their way through Iowa’s 99 counties and New Hampshire’s 234 cities and towns.
That Rory Bremner, he's a card. Imagine ringing up Margaret Beckett pretending to be Gordon Brown. The incident reminded me of Bart Simpson phoning up Mo's Tavern in a grown-up voice and asking for "Homer Sexual". The difference being I laughed when Bart did it. Snickering schoolboy humour works so much better when delivered by a schoolboy.
In fact, the whole incident demonstrates the increasing desperation of political satire. Any shock-jock prank-call big impact tactic will do. Like his fellow satirists Mark Thomas and Mark Steel, Bremner persistently makes the mistake of thinking that if you make a politically valid point then it is inherently funny. Unfortunately, satire does not work like that. If it did, then Evelyn Waugh's racist, amoral Decline and Fall would not be so laugh out loud funny.
The lack of imagination they show means that the likes of Thomas and Michael Moore stay wedded to the stunt culture of their TV shows - Thomas brilliantly characterised by Chris Morris as somebody who "goes around and bullies receptionists". The more they convince themselves they're on a crusade, the more I hear Bart Simpson on the phone to Mo.
Satirists are complex people who need to feel that they matter. The truth is that they don't - at least not how they want to. Bremner desperately wanted to find out some dark Watergate truth about the Cabinet and ended up looking like a chump. Insufferably smug as ever, Bremner declared of the phone call "The safe door swung open". "Really?" BBC political editor Nick Robinson responded "I couldn't spot a single newsworthy story in his conversation."
It is telling that Chris Morris, the big critic of the overt politicisation of satire, has made many of the most powerful political points. An MP agreeing to table a question in the House about fictional killer narcotics as part of a manufactured drugs scare? Now that, unlike the Beckett stunt, is funny.
Should we take a pill to quell jealousy, the urge that compelled an astronaut to plot murder?
WE BECAME ODDLY ENERGIZED when Lisa Marie Nowak, an astronaut with a sterling record, drove nearly 1,000 miles to attack Colleen Shipman, a woman Nowak believed was a rival for the man she loved. Nowak was charged with attempted murder, and her alleged "kill kit" contained a knife, 3 feet of hose, garbage bags, a BB gun and, most ominously, a steel mallet.
Jealousy is possibly the most destructive emotion housed in the human brain. It's the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide, according to analyses I did of data over the last century. And, statistics show, it's the leading drive behind the killing of "mate poachers" — interlopers who attempt to lure away our partners.
Jealousy causes much suffering. Those whose partners are jealous endure behavior that ranges from vigilance to violence. Their mail is torn open, their computers hacked, their activities monitored, their motives interrogated, their integrity impugned, their worth denigrated, their friends banished. Those who experience jealousy suffer too. They feel anxious, depressed, angry, humiliated, out of control, sometimes suicidal. Remember Othello?
In the modern world, we take pills for everything — weight loss, anxiety, depression. If the drug companies created a pill to eliminate jealousy, would we take it? Should we take it?
We like to believe that Nowak represents a strange and isolated case. Perhaps she snapped, suffering a mental meltdown. We like to think that jealousy is a personal failure, a sign of immaturity, neurosis or pathology. Psychological science, however, points in the opposite direction. Although few of us go to Nowak's extremes in attempting to destroy a romantic rival, we are all capable of jealousy. Contrary to common beliefs, jealousy exists in all human societies and is reliably activated by threats to a romantic relationship. My studies in the United States, the Netherlands and South Korea found that romantic rivals who have higher status or more money are more likely to cause men to erupt. Interlopers who are physically attractive or younger (Nowak is 43, Shipman 30) are more likely to stoke jealous passions in women.
By scanning the brains of volunteers who are instructed to imagine their lovers having sex with other people, neuroscientists have found that jealous emotions excite the amygdala and hypothalamus, brain structures linked with both sexual and aggressive behavior. Jealousy also stimulates the posterior superior temporal sulcus, which activates when an individual tries to discern the intentions of others or perceives that social norms are being violated. Even merely imagining our partner in the arms of a rival causes substantial physiological distress — a heart that races, electrodermal activity skyrocketing with a profusion of sweat, and muscular tension.
Many of us cherish romantic notions, which fluoresce on Valentine's Day, that if everything works out well, we will find our "one and only" love and live happily ever after. Sometimes we do. Unfortunately, there is much consensus about what constitutes desirability in mates, and attractive people are always in short supply compared to the many competing for their affections.
In one of my studies, 93% of American men and 82% of women said they had been the recipient of someone else's attentions while in a romantic relationship. And 87% of men and 88% of women believed that, like Nowak, they had been the victim of love thieves. Many of these thieves were successful; 53% of men and 41% of women reported having had a romantic partner lured away by a rival.
We discovered that mate poachers evoke an astonishing number of homicidal fantasies in otherwise normal people. In a study of 5,000 people in six cultures, 84% of women and 91% of men admitted to having had at least one fantasy of murder, and the vast majority fantasized about killing sexual rivals, often in painful and gruesome ways. Fortunately, most don't act on their homicidal fantasies. Laws and morals are powerful deterrents to murderous impulses — most of the time.
Wouldn't taking a pill to chemically deactivate this destructive emotion make for more harmonious relationships, reduce violence and create a happier society? Surely an enterprising drug company could fill its coffers by developing such a drug. But before we seek to do away with jealousy, let's first consider what functions it evolved to serve. Jealousy evolved, in part, to fend off mate poachers, and it inspires what scientists call "mate-guarding actions." In its modern form, that means spotting someone flirting with your beloved at a party and making tracks to Victoria's Secret or the local jeweler to secure an offering to make yourself more desirable. Hanging on to a mate is, evolutionarily speaking, usually advantageous for both sexes. Jealousy also alerts us to threats that loom on the horizon of a relationship, such as an imbalance in desirability between the partners. That's why a man who loses his job and consequently becomes less desirable to women often experiences jealousy, perceiving that his wife now has better mating options.
Modest displays of jealousy provide important signals to our partners about the depth of our love and strength of our commitment. Indeed, people sometimes intentionally evoke jealousy in partners by flirting with others precisely to test the bond. Most interpret a total absence of jealousy as a signal of lack of love. Jealousy also can stoke sexual ardor, reigniting desire in relationships whose romantic fires have cooled with the passage of time.
Taking a pill to eliminate jealousy would surely reduce much personal anguish, violence and murder triggered by lovers' triangles. But it also would make us less aware of threats to our romantic relationships. It might dampen our sex drive. And by depriving us of this litmus test of the strength of our emotional bonds, it might lead us to conclude that we and our partners lack the love we so desperately desire.
Jealousy reminds us that we possess an ancient brain designed for a world long forgotten. Adaptations so beneficial in our ancestral past, such as our intense fondness for fat, now lead to clogged arteries, obesity and life-threatening diseases. Is jealousy an antiquated emotion no longer serving the functions for which it was designed? Or does it still alert us to dangers and keep love alive, despite the destruction it causes when it spins out of control?
Cosmetics makers have always sold “hope in a jar”—creams and potions that promise youth, beauty, sex appeal, and even love for the women who use them. Over the last few years, the marketers at Dove have added some new-and-improved enticements. They’re now promising self-esteem and cultural transformation. Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” declares a press release, is “a global effort that is intended to serve as a starting point for societal change and act as a catalyst for widening the definition and discussion of beauty.” Along with its thigh-firming creams, self-tanners, and hair conditioners, Dove is peddling the crowd-pleasing notions that beauty is a media creation, that recognizing plural forms of beauty is the same as declaring every woman beautiful, and that self-esteem means ignoring imperfections.
Dove won widespread acclaim in June 2005 when it rolled out its thigh-firming cream with billboards of attractive but variously sized “real women” frolicking in their underwear. It advertised its hair-care products by showing hundreds of women in identical platinum-blonde wigs—described as “the kind of hair found in magazines”—tossing off those artificial manes and celebrating their real (perfectly styled, colored, and conditioned) hair. It ran print ads that featured atypical models, including a plump brunette and a ninety-five-year-old, and invited readers to choose between pejorative and complimentary adjectives: “Wrinkled or wonderful?” “Oversized or outstanding?” The public and press got the point, and Dove got attention. Oprah covered the story, and so did the Today show. Dove’s campaign, wrote Advertising Age, “undermines the basic proposition of decades of beauty-care advertising by telling women—and young girls—they’re beautiful just the way they are.”
Last fall, Dove extended its image building with a successful bit of viral marketing: a seventy-five-second online video called Evolution. Created by Ogilvy & Mather, the video is a close-up of a seemingly ordinary woman, shot in harsh lighting that calls attention to her uneven skin tone, slightly lopsided eyes, and dull, flat hair. In twenty seconds of time-lapse video, makeup artists and hair stylists turn her into a wide-eyed, big-haired beauty with sculpted cheeks and perfect skin. It’s Extreme Makeover without the surgical gore.
Watch "Evolution" a viral marketing video by Dove
But that’s only the beginning. Next comes the digital transformation, as a designer points-and-clicks on the model’s photo, giving her a longer, slimmer neck, a slightly narrower upper face, fuller lips, bigger eyes, and more space between her eyebrows and eyes. The perfected image rises to fill a billboard advertising a fictitious line of makeup. Fade to black, with the message “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” The video has attracted more than 3 million YouTube views. It also appears on Dove’s campaignforrealbeauty.com Web site, where it concludes, “Every girl deserves to feel beautiful just the way she is.”
Every girl certainly wants to, which explains the popularity of Dove’s campaign. There’s only one problem: Beauty exists, and it’s unevenly distributed. Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking. Whether you prefer Nicole Kidman to Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez to Halle Berry, or Queen Latifah to Kate Moss may be a matter of taste, but rare is the beholder who would declare Holly Hunter or Whoopi Goldberg—neither of whom is homely—more beautiful than any of these women.
For similar reasons, we still thrill to the centuries-old bust of Nefertiti, the Venus de Milo, and the exquisite faces painted by Leonardo and Botticelli. Greta Garbo’s acting style seems stilted today, but her face transcends time. We know beauty when we see it, and our reactions are remarkably consistent. Beauty is not just a social construct, and not every girl is beautiful just the way she is.
Take Dove’s Evolution video. The digital transformation is fascinating because it magically makes a beautiful woman more striking. Her face’s new geometry triggers an immediate, visceral response—and the video’s storytelling impact is dependent on that predictable reaction. The video makes its point about artifice only because most people find the manipulated face more beautiful than the natural one.
In Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, reported on experiments that let people rate faces and digitally “breed” ever-more- attractive composite generations. The results for female faces look a lot like the finished product in the Dove video: “thinner jaws, larger eyes relative to the size of their faces, and shorter distances between their mouths and chins” in one case, and “fuller lips, a less robust jaw, a smaller nose and smaller chin than the population average” in another. These features, wrote Etcoff, “exaggerate the ways that adult female faces differ from adult male faces. They also exaggerate the youthfulness of the face.” More than youth, the full lips and small jaws of beautiful women reflect relatively high levels of female hormones and low levels of male hormones—indicating greater fertility—according to psychologist Victor Johnston, who did some of these experiments.
More generally, evolutionary psychologists suggest that the features we see as beautiful—including indicators of good health like smooth skin and symmetry—have been rewarded through countless generations of competition for mates. The same evolutionary pressures, this research suggests, have biologically programmed human minds to perceive these features as beautiful. “Some scientists believe that our beauty detectors are really detectors for the combination of youth and femininity,” wrote Etcoff. Whether the beauty we detect arises from nature or artifice doesn’t change that visceral reflex.
Perhaps surprisingly, Etcoff herself advised Dove on several rounds of survey research and helped the company create workshops for girls. Dove touts her involvement (and her doctorate and Harvard affiliation) in its publicity materials. She sees the campaign as a useful corrective. Media images, Etcoff notes in an e-mail, are often so rarefied that “they change our ideas about what people look like and what normal looks like … Our brains did not evolve with media, and many people see more media images of women than actual women. The contrast effect makes even the most beautiful non-model look less attractive; it produces a new ‘normal.’”
Dove began its campaign by recognizing the diverse manifestations of universally beautiful patterns. The “real women” pictured in the thigh-cream billboards may not have looked like supermodels, but they were all young, with symmetrical faces, feminine features, great skin, white teeth, and hourglass shapes. Even the most zaftig had relatively flat stomachs and clearly defined waists. These pretty women were not a random sample of the population. Dove diversified the portrait of beauty without abandoning the concept altogether.
But the campaign didn’t stop there. Dove is defining itself as the brand that loves regular women—and regular women, by definition, are not extraordinarily beautiful. The company can’t afford a precise definition of real beauty that might exclude half the population—not a good strategy for selling mass- market consumer products. So the campaign leaves real beauty ambiguous, enabling the viewers to fill in the concept with their own desires. Some take real beauty to mean “nature unretouched” and interpret the Evolution video as suggesting that uncannily beautiful faces are not merely rare but nonexistent. Others emphasize the importance of character and personality: Real beauty comes from the inside, not physical appearance. And Advertising Age’s interpretation is common: that Dove is reminding women that “they’re beautiful just the way they are.”
Another Dove ad, focusing on girls’ insecurities about their looks, concludes, “Every girl deserves to feel good about herself and see how beautiful she really is.” Here, Dove is encouraging the myth that physical beauty is a false concept, and, at the same time, falsely equating beauty with goodness and self-worth. If you don’t see perfection in the mirror, it suggests, you’ve been duped by the media and suffer from low self-esteem.
But adult women have a more realistic view. “Only two percent of women describe themselves as beautiful” trumpets the headline of Dove’s press release. Contrary to what the company wants readers to believe, however, that statistic doesn’t necessarily represent a crisis of confidence; it may simply reflect the power of the word beautiful. Dove’s surveys don’t ask women if they think they’re unattractive or ugly, so it’s hard to differentiate between knowing you have flaws, believing you’re acceptably but unimpressively plain, and feeling worthlessly hideous. In another Dove survey, 88 percent of the American women polled said they’re at least somewhat satisfied with their face, while 76 percent said they’re at least somewhat satisfied with their body. But dissatisfaction is not the same as unhappiness or insecurity.
Like the rest of the genetic lottery, beauty is unfair. Everyone falls short of perfection, but some are luckier than others. Real confidence requires self-knowledge, which includes recognizing one’s shortcomings as well as one’s strengths. At a recent conference on biological manipulations, I heard a philosopher declare during lunch that she’d never have plastic surgery or even dye her hair. But, she confessed, she’d pay just about anything for fifteen more IQ points. This woman is not insecure about her intelligence, which is far above average; she’d just like to be smarter. Asking women to say they’re beautiful is like asking intellectuals to say they’re geniuses. Most know they simply don’t qualify.
It's the oldest jibe in the book: 'Americans just don't get irony.' But they do, argues comedian Simon Pegg - our national senses of humour have more in common than we like to think
You could spend a lot of time exploring the differences between British and American comedy only to reach the conclusion that, ironically, they're pretty much the same. Back when director Edgar Wright and myself were writing our debut feature, Shaun Of The Dead, we were certainly banking on a comic universality in the story of a suburban waster battling the living dead. We had every confidence that the humour would translate. Indeed, we made only one subtle dialogue adjustment during the writing process, changing the word "pissed" to "drunk", so as to avoid any confusion between the conditions of being munted and mardy. The film went on to enjoy surprising success in the US, suggesting that surmounting the supposed gulf between our respective senses of humour requires nothing more than a light skip.
When it comes to humour, however, there is one cultural myth that just won't die. You hear it all the time from self-appointed social commentators sat astride high horses, dressed as knights who say, "Ni". They don't get it. They never had it. They don't know what it is and, ironically, they don't want it anyway. That's right: "Americans don't do irony." This isn't strictly true. Although it is true that we British do use irony a little more often than our special friends in the US. It's like the kettle to us: it's always on, whistling slyly in the corner of our daily interactions. To Americans, however, it's more like a nice teapot, something to be used when the occasion demands it. This is why an ironic comment will sometimes be met with a perplexed smile by an unwary American. Take this exchange that took place between two friends of mine, one British (B), the other American (A): B: "I had to go to my grandad's funeral last week."
A: "Sorry to hear that."
B: "Don't be. It was the first time he ever paid for the drinks."
A: "I see."
Now, my American friend was being neither thick nor obtuse here; he simply didn't immediately register the need to bury emotion under humour. This tendency is also apparent in our differing use of disclaimers. When Americans use irony, they will often immediately qualify it as being so, with a jovial "just kidding", even if the statement is outrageous and plainly ironic. For instance...
A: "If you don't come out tonight, I'm going to have you shot... just kidding."
Of course, being America, this might be true, because they do all own guns and use them on a regular basis (just kidding). Americans can fully appreciate irony. They just don't feel entirely comfortable using it on each other, in case it causes damage. A bit like how we feel about guns.
It's not so much about having a different sense of humour as a different approach to life. More demonstrative than we are, Americans are not embarrassed by their emotions. They clap louder, cheer harder and empathise more unconditionally. It's an openness that always leaves me feeling slightly guilty and apologetic when American personalities appear on British chat shows and find their jokes and stories met with titters, not guffaws, or their achievements met with silent appreciation, rather than claps and yelps. We don't like them any less, we just aren't inclined to give that much of ourselves away. Meanwhile, as a Brit on an American chat show, it's difficult to endure prolonged whooping without intense, red-faced smirking.
Of course, it's the mainstream output of our respective entertainment industries that tends to shape our general opinion of each other. Ask the average American what they perceive British comedy to be and you will most likely be quoted shows such as Benny Hill and Are You Being Served? (although, thanks to BBC America, this is beginning to change). The fan demographic for both shows is markedly more diverse than in their country of origin. This is probably due to their parochial peculiarity, rather than the quality of the comedy (although both shows had their moments) and perhaps explains why the American audience took to Shaun Of The Dead with such affection. A refusal to occupy that transatlantic middle ground that sometimes scuppers British films intent on appealing in America means that the film plays as resolutely British. That approach does risk certain social and cultural references being lost in translation. But not many. The only joke in Shaun Of The Dead that never got a laugh in the States was Ed's request for a Cornetto ice cream at 8am on a Sunday morning. Overall, the cast's understated reserve in the face of flesh-eating zombies just added another layer of amusement for American viewers.
When it comes to their mainstream, America's emotional openness has often given way to a sentimentality that jars with our more guarded and cynical outlook. This is why the initially enjoyable Happy Days became blighted by saccharine lessons in family values, as Henry Winkler's originally subversive Fonzie was mercilessly appropriated by the middle-class American family, castrated by Marion Ross's Mrs Cunningham and forced to sit on it (although it's interesting to note that in outtakes from the series, Winkler and Ross would often play out an irresistible sexual tension between them with stolen gropes and kisses, solely for the enjoyment of the live studio audience, hinting at darker, more interesting themes than the show itself ever tackled). Generally speaking, sentimentality isn't easy for us. It makes us nervous and uncomfortable. We become edgy and dismissive of these brazen displays of emotion.
As the global village conurbates, however, our emotional habits are shifting. We are easing towards a slight liberation from our national inhibitions - although hopefully not losing them completely. Our uptightness is, after all, a huge part of our charm. The sitcom Friends, for instance, a show often dismissed by the cynical as "cheesy" or "schmaltzy" - and certainly capable of being both - was wholeheartedly adopted by the British public. So much so that two years after its final episode, a day barely passes without its inclusion in the schedules. Could it be any more ubiquitous?
I hated Friends when it first aired. The very title was anathema to me. It immediately evoked the embarrassing, droopy-eyed longings of the sickeningly hug-happy new American youth. The thought of all that togetherness, untempered by ironic undermining, made my skin crawl. Yet it drew me in. Due to a fine ensemble cast and some genuinely funny scriptwriting ("You're over me? When were you under me?"), Friends was readily accessible, even to us closed-off Brits. In fact, it arguably even opened us up a little. I certainly went from sneery to teary at Ross and Rachel's passionate, reconciliatory smooch. This moment might actually hold the key to a middle ground between British and American humour, specifically when it comes to heartfelt, emotional expression. The British aren't against it; we just believe it comes at a price. The success of the emotional climax in that particular scene is due entirely to the comedy preceding it. Ross's perm, Monica's fat suit, Rachel's nose all go toward setting the tone for the payoff, which the audience wholeheartedly accept. The sentiment is a reward, rather than a device to engender a sympathy laugh or, worse, a big, soppy, "Awww".
This device works in the best situation comedy on both sides of the Atlantic. The difference is perhaps simply that the average American is prepared to accept it sooner. Still, who could deny Del Boy a tearful pat of Grandad's chair, after his Keaton-worthy tumble through the wine bar? Or scoff at the field of poppies that fills the screen at the close of Blackadder Goes Forth? Similarly, Hawkeye's breakdown in the final M*A*S*H or Sam's switching off the lights of the Cheers bar for the last time both suggest we are prepared to take our comedy with a side of emotional drama. So perhaps we're not so dissimilar, after all.
One of the best exponents of worthy sentiment is a show that could easily be argued to be the greatest sitcom the US has ever produced. A razor-sharp, joyously dumb and potentially endless treatise on the American family and its suburban environment, The Simpsons is a remarkable show in that, in what is essentially a children's medium, it has established itself as a constant and often highly critical reflection of America itself. Hiding its subversiveness in bright colours and absurd situations, it has made satirical comment on virtually every aspect of America, rehearsing ideas that are at times positively "un-American". Yet at the same time the show exudes an enormous warmth and sentimentality, and holds at its heart great positivity about the linchpin of the American dream: the family. George Bush Snr once declared that Americans should be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. Simpsons' creator Matt Groening responded, saying, "Hey, the Simpsons are just like the Waltons. Both families are praying for the end of the Depression."
Scratch the surface of US comedic output and you will find many more such gems. Shows such as Arrested Development, Family Guy, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Larry Sanders Show all display a highly sophisticated sense of irony. But it's not just the more subversive end of comedy that disproves the myth: Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Futurama, Seinfeld, M*A*S*H (despite being wounded by canned laughter), Roseanne, Frasier, My Name Is Earl, to name a few, have all made an impact on America's popular consciousness. The Office is a perfect example of how edgier comedy can work on a grand scale on both sides of the Atlantic. The British and American versions have their own cultural and emotional specificities, but both work as painful satires on a lifestyle familiar to millions of Britons and Americans alike.
With the whole "Americans don't do irony" thing cleared up and consigned to the dustbin/garbage pail of passive/aggressive international preconception, we come to mine and Edgar Wright's latest filmic effort, Hot Fuzz. A film that we hope surfs the wave of subtle difference between our two countries, until it crashes red and frothy on to both shores. As if Tony Scott were to guest-helm an episode of Heartbeat, Hot Fuzz takes the most shamelessly histrionic excesses of American cinema and smashes them into that conservative and profoundly territorial enclave of Britishness, the country village, never once faltering in the assumption that everyone out there will understand. After all, we may all be different, but we're all capable of getting the same joke. In a world beset by prejudice and difference, how ironic is that?
It was consumers, not marketers, that made jeans a symbol of youthful revolt.
In the 1950s, Levi Strauss & Co. decided to update the image of its denim clothes. Until then, the company had been depending for sales on the romantic appeal of the Gold Rush and the rugged image of the cowboy. Hell, it was still calling its signature pants, the ones with the copper rivets, “waist overalls.” It didn’t want to abandon the evocative Gold Rush connection, but the postwar world was filling with consumption-minded creatures called “teenagers,” and it seemed time to rethink the company’s pitch.
So in 1956 Levi Strauss tried an experiment, releasing a line of black denim pants it called Elvis Presley Jeans. It was the perfect endorsement. On the branding level, it was a successful marriage of an old product and its developing new character. People had long worn denim for work, or to “westernize” themselves; now a new set of customers was wearing it to identify themselves with the postwar scene of rebellious urban (and suburban) outliers. Upon the release of Elvis’ 1956 hit movie Jailhouse Rock, writes James Sullivan in Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Gotham Books), “black jeans became the rage of the season.” That transition would eventually make undreamed-of profits for Levi Strauss and its many competitors.
The endorsement was wonderfully revealing from within too. Elvis actually disliked denim. To him, as to most people from real working-class backgrounds, it was just a reminder of working hard and being poor. The less denim Elvis wore, the happier he was. As for the company suits at Levi Strauss, they had no idea where their new customers would take them. The company was a lot more comfortable dealing with a safe, midcult crooner like Bing Crosby. In 1951 Levi Strauss had presented Crosby with a custom-made denim tuxedo jacket, just the kind of empty P.R. stunt the company bosses understood. The eroticizing Presley was unknown territory to them, and they nearly fumbled the whole bad boy connection—one that had already emerged via Presley, Brando, James Dean, and even the Beats—that would help put their product on nearly every pair of hips in the Western world (and on plenty of hips everywhere else too).
In fact, as Sullivan, a former critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, tells the story, the denim industry worked hard to undermine its own success. When jeans started making a transition from working clothes to something darker—the preferred style of the dreaded “juvenile delinquent”—the industry got worried. When school districts started promulgating anti-dungaree “dress codes,” it panicked. Suddenly a Denim Council sprang up to persuade adults that jeans were “Right for School.” Young people who wore denim, the industry group argued, were exemplary citizens who studied hard and who honored their fathers and mothers. Happily for Levi’s, Wrangler, and Lee (and for Jordache, Guess, Lucky, and the wave of designers to come) nobody paid much attention to the Denim Council.
It was civil libertarians who took care of the dress codes, with a legal strategy the industry never would have dreamed of. Groups challenged the codes as, in Sullivan’s words, “an imposition on freedom of expression.” In fact, the industry old-timers still don’t get it. Looking back on the emergence of jeans wearing as an issue of “expression,” one such old-timer can still tell Sullivan, “Amazing.…Just for a pair of pants.”
This series of events takes up just a few pages in one chapter of Sullivan’s 303-page book. But I’ve focused on it because it is a stellar example of a primary market issue that many people—not only markets’ critics but some of their defenders too—have failed to acknowledge. It’s neither makers nor marketers who successfully attach meaning to the products they want to sell. It’s the consumers who impute meaning to those products they choose to buy.
The anthropologist Grant McCracken has done a lot of scholarly work to elucidate this distinction, and The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell has been a pioneer in reporting it. His famous 1997 piece “The Coolhunt” focused on consultants who attempt to monitor “coolness” as it is attached to—and detached from—consumer goods by a hierarchy of influential buyers. Gladwell offered case studies of brands, such as Hush Puppies shoes, that had become cool (for a while, anyway) without the manufacturer or its ad people ever having a clue. Jeans conquered the world—Levi’s 501s are the single most successful garment ever designed—not because of the denim industry’s efforts to give them meaning but in spite of them.
The rest of Sullivan’s book is addressed to the culture, the fashion, and of course the business of jeans. The last of these threads is the most valuable, since it is probably the least known and the most revealing. Who knew, for example, that leisure suits were introduced by Lee? (And what does that episode say about the marketers’ conception, let alone control, of a product’s meaning?) Sullivan’s book is as comprehensive on its subject as you are likely to want, if not more so. Jeans and Jack Kerouac. Jeans and the dude ranch. Jeans and the advent of the zipper. Jeans and punk. Jeans and disco. Jeans and the indigo trade. Thousand-dollar Jeans. Collectible jeans. Even pants (not jeans) and Brigham Young, who in 1830 charged that trousers with buttons in front were “fornication pants.”
There’s even jeans and the color blue. Sullivan has penned an ode to blueness that goes on for four pages. (“The deeper blue becomes,” he quotes the artist Wassily Kandinsky as saying, “the more urgently it summons man toward the infinite.”) Best of all, though, is jeans and Vladimir Nabokov, despite the fact that Nabokov has nothing much to say about jeans.
Sullivan uses Nabokov inventively, quoting from his 1955 novel Lolita to demonstrate how the narrator’s “refined” sensibility is transformed by a whole world of low-end culture that has become—for him—eroticized. The novel’s motels and shopping strips, writes Sullivan, “are the consummate low-culture backdrops for Lolita’s jeans, sneakers, and lollipops.” It’s not just Lolita that Nabokov’s intellectual narrator has fallen for. And if you don’t see what eroticized low-end culture has to do with the triumph of American jeans, then Elvis really has left the building, and you’ve gone with him.
A guide to eco-living in the 21st century: Is it ethical to get married?
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Dear Ethan,
I am writing to you from my solar-powered “Green”berry in my honeymoon hotel in north Africa. You see, last weekend I got married, but now I’m thinking to myself: was that an ethical thing to do? Does tying the knot mean tying the planet in chains? Please advise! I will plant as many trees as it takes to make up for my nuptials.
Helen Cox Morocco ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Helen,
Marriage can be a beautiful thing. Sheba and I tied the knot in an open-air ceremony in Dorset. She wanted to wear a traditional meringue-style starch-white dress until I reminded her that polyester, from which most wedding dresses are made, consists of petrochemicals and is non-biodegradable, and that silk dresses involve boiling alive or electrocuting silk worms in order to extract the silk from their cocoons. In a pre-wedding heart-to-heart, I explained I couldn’t marry a woman who was willing to wear a garment spawned from worm torture, and thankfully she compromised!
She wore an off-white dress (to symbolise the staining effect man has on the planet) constructed from natural bamboo. It was made (or should that be built?!) by those marvellous men and women at the fashion house Bamboosa, who point out that Bamboo is ‘nature’s most sustainable resource, is grown without pesticides or chemicals and is 100 per cent biodegradable’. After the ceremony we recycled the dress by posting it – freight class – to a Panda sanctuary in western China where it was fed to a bear called Ziyi and her four cubs. Sheba had a rash for a few days afterwards, and even kicked me out of the marital bed over ‘that bloody bamboo dress’! When she calmed down I explained it was probably just nature’s way of warning us not to take Her plants for granted.
I wore one of those hilarious t-shirts that looks like a tuxedo (!!!), which both raised a smile amongst our friends and families and saved me from having to splash out on a wasteful three-piece suit that had probably been hand-stitched by a nine-year-old in some sweatshop in the Far East and, worse, flown here by aeroplane. (There are an estimated 300,000 weddings in Britain each year, for which around 100,000 garments are flown over from factories abroad. That means Tuxedo and Wedding Dress Miles account for a whopping 140,000 tonnes of CO2 EVERY YEAR.)
We used sycamore seeds as confetti, because it is part of their evolutionary purpose to be thrown and to fly. Friends said they were quite moved by the act of throwing sycamore seeds, feeling honoured to do the kind of thing normally done so well by Wind and Rain. Our bouquets were made of grass, held together by knots of straw. After the wedding we held a special Throwing-The-Bouquet ceremony where we deposited them in a friend’s compost toilet. There, our grass bouquets mixed with natural waste to create a beautiful (if pongy!) fertiliser. Between feeding the dress to Ziyi and fertilising the soil with our bouquets, we expressed our eternal love for the Earth as well as each other.
However, not everyone has a Green Wedding; some people still insist on having a White Wedding, or what I like to call Noxious Nuptials….and if you had one of those, Helen, then shame on you!
That wonderful organisation Climate Care estimates that the average wedding emits around 14.5 tonnes of CO2. That is more in one day than the average person emits in a year, which is 12 tonnes. The clothes, the transport of friends and family – sometimes from abroad – plus the preparation and cooking of food all take their toll on the planet. But there are ways to have an ethical wedding.
Firstly, take a tip from Sheba and me and wear naturally made clothing. You can choose from bamboo, straw or grass, and there is a wonderful fashion house that makes shoes from old discarded tyres. Wearing its striking footwear on your wedding day would be such a cool way to stick up two fingers (excuse my French!) at the rampant motoring and oil industry. Imagine, you would be taking their products, which are designed to speed cars, choke out smog and mow down unsuspecting pensioners and children, and using them in a loving ceremony.
Despite the best efforts of my friends in the Anti-Confetti Campaign, who protest outside church and registry-office weddings most Saturdays and Sunday, some people STILL throw confetti. They don’t realise that confetti consists of bleach and artificial colourings that leach into the dirt and soil. It is the Wedding Day equivalent of acid rain. Throw seeds, nuts or sycamores instead, which can then take root in the ground. (Don’t throw Brazil nuts! A friend of mine made the mistake of throwing them at Zac Goldsmith’s wedding to Sheherazade Ventura-Bentley in 1999, and we ended up with a battered and bruised bride and bridegroom!)
And instead of brides-to-be selfishly demanding expensive diamond rings – the product of diamond-mining, which is like a scar on the beautiful continent of Africa – they should look to buy metallic and synthetic-diamond jewellery from wonderful outlets such as GreenKarat, the ecologically responsible jewellers. Even better, they should make their own wedding jewellery from stone or wood, which has the benefit of being recyclable if, Mother Nature forbid, they should ever split from or divorce their husbands.
However, Helen, easily the WORST aspect of Noxious Nuptials is the honeymoon – and I see from your email that you are already on yours. I am very disappointed. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that man-made flight is propelling us into a future of floods, droughts, disastrous warming and potentially a new Ice Age. Sheba and I honeymooned in our garden, in an eco-friendly tent and with only the birds and the bees (if you get my drift!) to keep us company. That, Helen, is true love….whereas swanning off to Morocco is, I’m afraid, true hate. You must plant 65 trees and 10 shrubberies to neutralise your nuptials.
