Media Are a Plural (Noun [So is "Data"]): On Not Making the Job Easier for Right-Wing Propagandists

     In his flawed, old, and still-totally-essential study, The True Believer (1951), Eric Hoffer talks about devils and their ideal number for politics and propaganda.

It seems that, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is one. We have it from Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making “even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category.” When Hitler picked the Jew as his devil, he peopled practically the whole world outside Germany with Jews or those who worked for them. […] Stalin, too, adheres to the monotheistic principle when picking a devil.  […] (§ 67)

This is a bit of an overstatement, but useful: If your goal is demonization, it's best to have a conglomerate target, where your audience won't get confused and/or resistant with thinking up exceptions. If your target for demonization is "the Jew," the people you want to move aren't tempted to think of Jews (plural) they might know who are not demons. 

    Nowadays, most of us don't talk of "the Jew" or "the Black" or "the White Man" (although you can still hear a Canadian Jew use the last term in THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ — now streaming! — from 1974); and this is progress. We still, though, too often lump together large and disparate groups and talk about "the Americans," for example, in ways too casual for discussing the neighbors as actual people in an actual "the neighborhood."

    And many of us talk and write about "the media ... it," a singular.

    First off, an old, Leftist magazine like The Nation just isn't the respectable Right-wing National Review, much less Fox News or Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloid The Sun; and none of them are Pravda under Stalin or Sports Illustrated — or graffiti or movies or talk-radio.

    More relevant here, keeping "media" a plural makes it just a little bit harder for demagogues and their operatives to lump the media all together, demonize them as an It — and get the demagogues' True Believer followers to believe only the demagogues and their operatives.

    "Data" is more subtle. Hoffer talks about how an effective mass movement in its active phase — think of a very large cult, on the move — takes a potential True Believer and makes him (mostly males at this stage) fanatically loyal to the cause. One technique is "interposing a fact-proof screen between him and reality" (§ 43). But this is for the hard-core and usually requires doctrine and indoctrination. 

    For us in the United States in the 2020's, conscious evil doctrines — though serious — may be less of an immediate threat than just a general impatience with facts and impatience with a scientific/critical attitude and approach to the world. This gets complicated, including how cold and alienating the facts of the human condition in the universe. One simple thing, though, is that people would be less pushed toward impatience if they didn't hear about a singular "data" from which "Science" makes clear, consistent, and rarely-changing pronouncements. In the messy real world, workers in various sciences work with varying sets of data to try to make sense of those (plural) data. New and different data: different hypotheses, different advice (and, yes, I'm thinking about CoViD-19 and complaints about inconsistency and changing rules/advice). 

    So plural for "data," please, and let's use "Science" pretty rarely and for one way humans ask questions of the universe — a philosophical sort of thing — and "sciences" when getting to the nitty-gritty of dealing with something as complex and very messy as a pandemic.

Some Old Slogans for Continuing Debate on Climate Change

• Best pronounced with an accent from southern Scotland or the north of England: "Where there's muck, there's money." There's a history to environmental degradation for profit, and checking out old arguments can be useful to avoid accusations of bias in current arguments.

• "Posterity don't vote (and neither do most young people)."

Encourage them young folk to register to vote and get involved in boring elective politics. And remind old folks they might want to leave a livable world to their grandkids and/or avoid ending up Soylent Grey™ in their last days. On which subject, or part thereof ...

• "Let em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-Six!" — First national anthem, according to Mel Brooks's 2000-year old man. It's preferable to "Hurray for me; and piss on you all," but on a global issue a global-size "circle of concern" is a good idea. Global disasters will take Cave 76 with them.

• "Know how to answer an Epicurean": Talmudic advice meaning a theistic Jew should learn how to argue with a materialist. Similarly, atheists should learn how (when and if) to argue with theists and even Fundamentalists.You don't have to agree on fundamentals to come to some practical conclusions and work together. (Variation from 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness: ""We can pull a sledge together without being kemmerings" [§6] — we don't have to have a bonded, long-term, loving relationship with people [or even like them] to cooperate on specific projects.)

• "Rhetoric: The Art of Ethical Persuasion": That's *persuasion*, getting people to do what you want them to do (and which they should do: that "ethical" part). Winning the argument and/or getting Truth is for philosophy. So let it go with "global warming" and "severe climate change" and drop insisting on "anthropogenic" if it'll get turn the discussion n from survival strategies to the deep causes of the phenomena and/or will have you come across in another in a long line of elitist puritans trying to shame people. Earth is heating up; this is a long-term trend; it's dangerous — What can and should we do about it? Cutting down carbon emissions is one obvious thing, especially advisable since we should be doing it anyway (our descendants might want some handy hydrocarbons of their own and may be very pissed off to learn, "You freaking burned it?!" See above on Soylent Grey™.

Unplanned Pregnancies, Sexually-Transmitted Diseases, and Effective Sex-Ed (Mostly Male Division)

Opening of a recent news story from the US Midwest: 

"The former head of Ohio’s sexual abstinence programs 

played a role in the Trump administration’s decision to end

a federal grant program to fight teen pregnancy [...]."

My comment on a key aspect of effective "sex-ed" for reducing unplanned pregnancies and VD/STDs, and more generally: 
One of the more useful moves that will reduce unintended pregnancies is the law in LA requiring male porn performers to wear condoms while performing on camera. America needs a well-crafted and mildly Machiavellian "Wrap That Willy!" campaign getting across the message that Real Men control their reproduction and protect their health, and that young, virile, Real Men use condoms and hold their erections (as opposed to their literally limp-dick elders).
The issue here is indeed morality and values and whether we value taboos and decorum over preventing unwanted pregnancies and definitely unwanted diseases — and reducing the number of abortions. (Mature men additionally value the health and desires of their sexual partners, but that's another ad/propaganda campaign.)I am serious here. When AIDS was a pressing issue I challenged some S.W. Ohio newspaper editors with the question that if they could save ten lives a year they'd run stories with headlines like, "Butt-Fucking Is Risky: Wrap That Willy." Linguistic and other taboos vs. lives. They said, of course, that they'd obey the taboo and not run such headlines or stories — but I'd made them think about it and feel bad, and I said both were my objectives with the thought experiment.

The Right to Be Let Alone

In 1972, Student Life officials at Miami University (Oxford, OH) applied the University rule against solicitation in the dorms against political campaigns. For sound political reasons, neither the McGovern nor Nixon campaigns intended to canvass the MUO dorms, but we joined together to assert what I explicitly called our right to annoy people to spread our message — propaganda in a neutral sense — and solicit votes.

The two campaigns and our First Amendment rights prevailed, which was and remains a good thing.

Since then, the means of communication have multiplied, and simultaneously we've moved toward the hyper-capitalism and rule by hucksters satirized in Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's great comic dystopia, The Space Merchants (1952/53). So nowadays we must balance a generalized First Amendment right to propagandize, sell to, and annoy against a generalized (Fourth Amendment) right that can be usefully overstated with Justice William O. Douglas's line, “The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

As lawyers can now chime in, it will be a complicated balancing act.

"It Could Have Something to Do With Cancer …": Commercialism, Identity Politics, and Disease

            My one experience with actual science was working summer of 1964 in the gut lab (officially "Gastro-Intestinal Research," later "Gastroenterology") at Michael Reese Hospital and Research Center in Chicago. One of the projects I was tangentially involved with — possibly washing the equipment — was up for renewal of funding, and as part of my education, and maybe to get some work out of me as an English major, I was given a draft of the grant proposal to read. My only comment on content was on the paragraph listing all the wonderful potential of the project: a raised eyebrow and the sort-of question, "Cancer?" We were doing pretty pure basic research, which likely would have some use in dealing with ulcers, but cancer …? The response I got was my cryptic main title: well, "It could have something to do with cancer"; down the line, what we found out about gut motility — or whatever the project was — could throw some light on cancer. I muttered something about "Why not ulcers (maybe)?" and was told something like, "Americans aren't scared silly about ulcer."

            Now people in our lab were doing research into early detection of cancers — we made Time magazine with that project — so our claim of a cancer connection was credible, and our work was solid basic physiology, however labeled. Still, I was struck by the idea of fads and fashions in diseases and that the biggest gun fashion in mid- and late-20^th-century diseases was cancer.

            I've been thinking about that cancer quote since I got an ad with my newspaper on pink paper stock, with print and shading in a variety of blue few men have a word for — "dark lavender"? — and featuring a photo of a woman. At the top left of one side, balanced down the page by a black-and-white photo of a mature woman, was the sentence, "Let Us Help You Detect Your Risk Early".

            The ad was for "Life Line Screening" not for breast cancer, as I initially thought, but for cardiovascular disease.

            Which is as things should be.

            "According to the American Heart Association," citing statistics in line with those I've seen from more disinterested sources, "cardiovascular disease — including heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke — kills nearly a half-million women in the U.S. each year. That figure exceeds the next seven causes of death combined. More women die from [CVD, cardiovascular diseases] than of all cancers (including breast cancer, which kills about 40,000 women annually), respiratory conditions, Alzheimer's disease, and accidents combined." Into the 1990s, the American Heart Association was estimating that "1 in 2 women will eventually die of heart disease or stroke, compared with 1 in 25 who will eventually die of breast cancer" — and even allowing for Heart Association bias and hype and capacity for error, the point is still that coronary heart disease and stroke are far more dangerous to women than breast cancer.

            Now the flip side of the Lifeline Screening ad was specific: "We Can Help You Avoid Cardiovascular Disease," but the color stock remained (of course), and I suspect I was not the only person to first think, "Breast cancer."

            I had an aunt who had breast cancer, and a friend, and the daughters of two friends, but that probably wasn't why I thought "Breast cancer"; breast cancer has VIP friends and gets a lot of publicity, much of it using pink. As an embedded quotation in Sandy M. Fernandez's "Pretty in Pink " article has it, in her brief "History of the Pink Ribbon" (1998):

“Pink is the quintessential female color […]. The profile on pink is playful, life-affirming. We have studies as to its calming effect, its quieting effect, its lessening of stress. [Pastel pink] is a shade known to be health-giving; that’s why we have expressions like ‘in the pink.’ You can’t say a bad thing about it.” Pink is, in other words, everything cancer notably is not.

And pink was picked up by powerful commercial allies in the war on breast cancer, as Fernandez very usefully documents, and as a feminist cause, picking up the ribbon from the red ribbon of (gay-inflected) AIDS activism, and — in a move Fernandez doesn't discuss — inspiring later emphasis on prostate cancer (totally for men, usually straight and older).

            These, too, are important disease threats, and I'm sympathetic, with an uncle who had prostate cancer and a good friend who died young from it; and I still contribute to AIDS research (I'll send my check to GMHC this week, guys, honest!).

            Still ….

            Still, working backward: The 20^th-c. emphasis on finding a cure for AIDS as what in the United States was initially a syndrome among young, gay men, drew attention away from AIDS prevention as part of wider programs against the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases and the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies. Gay activists did yeoman's work in encouraging use of condoms in the gay community; the attention paid to a high-voltage disease like AIDS, however, distracted from the necessity to reduce the spread of increasingly endemic diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis — and distracted in sex-talk from discussions of male responsibility in contraception. Finding a pharmaceutical/medical cure for AIDS was an easy cause to push as opposed to a wide-scale, loudly public WRAP THAT WILLY! campaign encouraging use of condoms, and spelling out in a full-monty propaganda effort when condoms were most important. As I challenged a group of newspaper editors in south-west Ohio, "If it would save ten lives a year to do so — and it would save at least ten in our area — would you run large public service ads proclaiming in large font. 'Butt-Fucking Is Risky. WRAP THAT WILLY!'"? Promoting medicines to control AIDS bears far fewer costs than breaking linguistic taboos and taking on, among others, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

            The emphasis on breast cancer and then prostate cancer drew too much attention from non-sexy (pun intended) but deadly menaces such as heart disease. Equally bad, the emphasis on early detection of breast and prostate cancer led to overtesting and overdiagnosis, and in some cases overtreatment with serious harm. Additionally, there were the monetary costs of testing, plus the figurative but important costs of anxiety from false positives from screenings and the human-hours appropriated and rendered unpleasant by the unpaid tasks of going for mammographies, PSA (prostate-specific antigen) tests, biopsies, and digital rectal exams (DREs). Added to that, and getting back to my initial topic, there is the warping of research when funding is too much for the "popular" diseases: a particularly perverse application of middle-school ethos obsession with popularity.

            In some ways, it is amusing that there are fads and fashions in disease. Mostly, though, attention to high-profile diseases because they have been rendered high profile — is a bad thing. Yes, ladies, get mammograms made if, but only if, you're in one or more categories at risk for breast cancer; and, gentlemen, get your PSAs and DREs — if, but only if, prostate cancer is a significant risk for you, personally, at your age. (Face up to it guys: live a long life, and you will get prostate cancer.) And contribute to worthy causes fighting cancer.

            But —

            But recall that other important initialism and contribute a bit more generously for research into CVD, cardio-vascular disease, which is more likely to kill you than cancer. And quit smoking and keep your weight down and get exercise and get your blood pressure checked and do those other unexciting things related to low-profile diseases that don't get ribbons and their own color and fail to attract friends in high places.

            You want to save women's lives? Spread the word about heart diseases — and try to see it as a mild advantage that you might save a few guys' lives as well.

"Justice or Else": A Brief Rhetorical Analysis

On The Daily Show for 10 October 2015, Roy Wood Jr. asked some White folks what they made of the Million Man March Commemoration slogan "Justice or Else," specifically what was meant by the "or Else." Wood got answers indicating "it sounds threatening" with more specifics from one young woman including, "like riots, like violence, shit [bleeped out] going down" and several more phrases indicating bad things like "blood, gore, death." Wood responded "You get all that from 'or Else'?!" The young woman answered back "It's a wide-open category, open for interpretation" — and Wood got the great laugh line I hear as "No wonder White folks write all the horror movies; [you?] just conjure up crazy shit in your heads."

Wood's next line — a transition back to the Million Man March — was, "So I guess a slogan demanding fairness and equality can easily be interpreted by certain people as murder and mayhem"; and he returned to the march and got the specific answer, to "or Else" in this context: a nicely anticlimactic one, that the "or Else" planned was holiday economic boycotts.

As one with some experience in the propaganda and protest biz, and a one-time teacher of courses with the word "Rhetoric" in the title, I'll get pedantic enough to say the young White woman was exactly right on "or Else": "Its a wide-open category, open for interpretation," which is what makes it effective.

It's like the phrase "by any means necessary," or like a US President saying "No options are off the table." To use an example out of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and recent history: Does "by any means necessary" include throwing "sulphuric acid in a child's face" if that is thought necessary in the struggle (whatever struggle)? Was the President of the United States threatening to bomb Teheran off the face of the Earth? Probably not, but strategic bombing is an option: obviously; with a couple of bombs the US blew most of Hiroshima and Nagasaki off the face of the Earth, and we and the British did a pretty thorough job more conventionally destroying Dresden.

Similarly, in a sense, with demonstrations.

During the National Student Strike of 1970, my group at the University of Illinois did a good job of keeping things peaceful (even if we didn't do well getting media coverage: "No blood, no news," as one newsroom exec told us explicitly). Still, we were aware that we had a limited window of opportunity to negotiate with the U of I administration: "As long as they look at a delegation of us and see a mob at our backs," however peaceful, or small, the actual crowd, we had leverage to deal.

Demonstrations are a way of exerting power in Hannah Arendt's sense in On Violence: large numbers of people gathering together in concerted action. From the point of view of The Powers that Be, however — always and inevitably — large demonstrations carry an implicit threat: the crowd may get violent, and its very existence is at least somewhat disruptive.

And that is fine. "Power concedes nothing without a demand," as Frederick Douglass said, and at least on occasion the demand must be backed up, minimally by the threat of disruption.

Which returns us to perceived threats.

In the US everything political, to overstate a bit, is at least "inflected" by race, and the racial (or racialist or racist) aspect with the White understanding of "or Else" is a generalized White fear of Blacks on the solid as well as pathological grounds that we Whites as a group have ripped off, exploited, and otherwise injured American Blacks as a group, and those Blacks might well want restitution ... and some might want revenge.

So let us cut the crap: "or Else" is always an open-ended threat made more effective in this instance because US Whites generally see Blacks as a threat to start with and because the Powers that Be see any massing of the masses as a potential danger. If the "or Else" is merely "a slogan demanding fairness and equality" with the threat no more than an economic boycott — well that is something for which Whites should be grateful, but also something demonstration organizers shouldn't repeat too often.

Open-ended threats open to nervous if not paranoid interpretation — can work nicely.

News in Depth: ISIS, the Crash of 2008, Kim Davis and "The Higher Law"

For where I'm coming from here:

            My first college term paper, sort of, was an exercise in a writing course where the assignment was to find a historical event from the week of one's birth, research it, and write about it. Having been born in 1943 — a year with a lot more history than is healthy — I had many options but chose to write on the Battle of Stalingrad, arguable the decisive battle of World War II and in any event one of the crucial battles in world history.

                        Some of my research was reading a military history book or two of the many on the subject, but what I spent most of my time on was reading the contemporary coverage in The New York Times, especially the official daily Communiqués from the Germans and from the Russians, and comparing (and contrasting) the Communiqués with what I was reading from the academic historians.

                        Somewhat surprisingly, especially given that— SPOILER ALERT! — the Russians eventually won the battle, the Russian communiqués generally included more lies than those of the Germans.

            I grew up during the Cold War, and could say with Bob Dylan, "I’ve learned to hate Russians / All through my whole life" and was propagandized on how the Ruskies couldn't talk without resorting to propaganda. Well, yeah, yeah, and so forth. But: But my grandparents fled the Russian Empire back when there was an emperor, one who proudly called himself "Autocrat of all the Russias," and I had some personal reasons to distrust Russians. Plus, crucially, I had also grown up on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and its detailed analysis — from a Left perspective — of how lying was built into Stalinism and had become a tradition in the new Russian Empire.

            So a couple weeks back I was surprised to find myself flipping to channel 216 on the TV in the exercise room of my condo complex to watch RT the Russian TV network for a fix of hard news. I wasn't the only one of the gym regulars, either: we no longer got Al Jazeera, and BBC America only had a couple hours of news a day during gym hours — so that left the Ruskies.

            More exactly, it left the Ruskies given how repetitive and shallow CNN and MSNBC have become — and how Fox remains what it was in the classic analysis and mea culpa of Bart Simpson: "Then I had this crazy dream that my family were all just cartoon characters and that our success led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News."

Which is the rant on where I'm coming from, leading into a fairly brief, epitomizing rant on a few places where CNN, MSNBC, et al. can go to replace some of their incessant repetition and add a depth to their coverage. This comes from me, an amateur at best in the journalism biz, and on the basis of listening to just one pretty respectable NPR news-panel/call-in show covering a week in (perhaps significantly) early September 2015.

            * A listener called in to the show to mention the Colin Powell interview on Meet the Press for 6 September, where he came out in favor of the Iran nuclear deal. It was an important interview, not for its immediate political effects — which a panelist noted were minimal, given where the Republican Party is nowadays — but more for a major figure like Colin Powell's introducing into the debate on ISIS the double-m phrase: "Mass Movement." ISIS spearheads a mass movement in its militant phase, the phase featuring fanatics who embrace self-sacrifice (and don't much mind killing other people). We need news shows explaining and applying Eric Hoffer's 1951 analysis of The True Believer for the history of such movements through World War II and note how very closely some key elements of the situation today parallel those that saw the rise of the early Christian Church and Islam, and, perhaps more so, given advances in communications technology, the parallels with the Wars of Religion growing out of the Protestant Reformation and lasting through much of the 17th c., where the printing press was crucial. In a sense, ISIS is, as President Obama said, the "JV team," and al-Qaeda Little League — compared to the full-fledged mass movement likely to succeed ISIS, if they can find a charismatic leader to inflame the faithful.

                        Osama bin Laden may or may not have read Hoffer when he concluded that what was needed to reinvigorate Islam was an attack by the Great Satan of America. The neocons in the Bush administration undoubtedly forgot their Hoffer and similar arguments when they responded to the attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 by giving bin Laden exactly what he wanted. But they did what they did, and this awakened not just the Arab Spring but the forces of sectarianism, tribalism, nationalism, and fanaticism that can consolidate into opposing mass movements that can shake the world as much as those of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (in Protestant terms) in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and Hitler and Stalin et al. in the 20^th.

            * A second story of the week was the decision of the US Department of Justice to go after big-time finance criminals, and a member of the news-panel noted that many of the disastrous financial moves leading up to The Great Recession of 2008 were legal. That is the story, people! That is the scandal! That is a more important issue than putting into jail a few bad actors on Wall Street and, in terms of its effects of most people's lives a hell of a more important story than finding parts of crashed airplanes. (I know it's perverse and paranoid to do so, but I sometimes wonder if CNN staff are tempted to shoot down the occasional aircraft on what for them is a slow newsweek. But I digress.) The bad actions of a compliant US Congress that allowed the Crash of 2008 and invite another one — that is the story that needs development over several weeks or months or as long as it takes to drum some basic ideas into the heads of at least the portion of the public that watch and listen to news.

            * On a lighter note, relatively speaking, there was the latest round of US Kulturkampfe ("cultural struggles") as evidenced in the story of the jailing and releasing of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and then, with equal opportunity, to any couples.

                        When the dust settles, "Higher Law" appeals need to be taken seriously and argued about. In a portion of the Book of Deuteronomy that contains a lot of oppressive rules and some really bad ideas (Ki Teitzei), there is the commandment, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him" (23.15-16). The Code of Hammurabi and its successors long before and long after Deuteronomy "decreed death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves until 1864. There would be much to be said in praise of local officials and Federal Marshals refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — or clerks refusing to cooperate with the Nazi Nuremburg Laws on racial purity; and "Higher Law" arguments can be useful. We need some in-depth conversations there long after we've forgotten who Kim Davis might be.

                        We also need to discuss why adult Americans would need permission of the Commonwealth of Kentucky to get married, and we need some lawyers competent in simple English to explain on TV and in other media that the State doesn't get involved in marriage directly — or not so much any more — but in contracts for setting up a special kind of household. And then we can slog on to the legal privileging of those households that center on a married couple. Back when "Be fruitful and multiply" made a lot of sense as a commandment to human beings, such privileges also made sense, as part of a strategy to use marriage to encourage fertile heterosexual mating where it was likely to produce children who'd be raised in a stable family unit. The times they have a-changed, and our debates on the environment and resources have to turn to issues of population ... which leads us back to what sort of households the State should be encouraging to handle responsible reproduction and child rearing — and providing an effective home for people.

                        Gays should be pissed to hell that now that only with gay marriage US society might get around to discussing the privileging of marriage and how we'll define marriage — but, sorry, guys and gals and Other: inter-racial marriage wasn't enough to get the conversation going, but gay marriage is sufficiently controversial, a "sexy" enough news story, to do so.

                        So with this larger issue, too: Come on, US media, the chum is in the water and Kim Davis gave you had a nice feeding frenzy on sex, religion, and politics. "Life is uncertain; so eat desert first" — and it's time for your figurative veggies and protein and to get to more profound issues of the individual's obligations to the State in matters of faith and morals and crasser question of "Who gets what — Who profits, who pays?" in terms of marriage and households and taxes.

Porn in the Public Interest (3 May 2013)

{Bloggers Note: For whatever reasons, this post on OpenSalon got more hits — a whole lot more — than other individual item I've ever posted to the web.}

Headlines in the News:

"Gates Foundation Funds Development of High Tech Condoms"; 

"California’s landmark condoms in porn bill (AB 332) 

clears first Assembly committee, 5 to 1" (References: Gates, AB 332) 

       
            If fashion can get people, especially young people, to tattoo and pierce their bodies, shave their genitals, wear stiletto heals and low-rider pants, and — in the developed world — buy water in small bottles; then fashion can also be a force for good, encouraging condom use.

            So there should be strong support for California Assembly Bill 332 and similar legislation in other states requiring condoms on male actors in pornographic movies. The argument for condom use for sex-workplace safety is legitimate, but there's a more pressing argument for such legislation as a truly public, public health issue. In their way, porn stars are role models, and if their example can be a major influence getting young people to shave like semi-pro swimmers or body builders, porn-actor behavior can be important in making condom-use fashionable, normal, and normative: perhaps even, in the old expression, cool. Condom use as normal behavior for young people has obvious benefits limiting sexually-transmitted diseases, reducing unwanted pregnancies and, hence, the numbers of abortions, and more generally encouraging responsibility among older boys and young men, who should take responsibility for their reproduction and health.

            As part of a larger public information program — i.e., "Wrap That Willy!" propaganda — porn stars can inculcate the doctrines that "Real Men Control Their Reproduction" and "Real Men Can Hold an Erection Well Enough to Be Cool in Condoms." Well, and that Real Women limit their heterosex lives to such Real Men, and have the sexiness and know-how to help their men, let's say, achieve and maintain their "reality."

            Parents and other older adults could also get involved.

            "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and it isn't a good idea. "The pill" was an excellent idea, except insofar as its existence got people to think contraception an issue for just women and girls. At 18-years old, I was expected to be a young adult, and a good while before I turned 18 my father gave me an optimistically large box of condoms and told me, "Until you know what to do with it; keep it in your pants." I suspect that bit of SexEd was more useful than most of what gets taught in US schools.

            Parents, however, are radically limited in their influence over fashion; stardom, including porn-star stardom, is powerful.

Flies: Watch Out for Honey / Consumers: Watch Out for Deals

"You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

— Poor Richard's Almanac (traditional)

 
         On the web on 27 August 2011, someone posting as "Jeremy" noted "that you actually attract more fruit flies with vinegar than honey, because the acetic acid in vinegar makes them think they sense fruit," but he (?) was good enough to note also that even if that bit of natural history is true, the proverb is still that you can deal more effectively with people if you are sweet to them than if you are sharp and biting. The upshot of the saying is the same as that of Aesop's fable of the Sun vs. the North Wind (Boreas), competing to get a man to take off his cloak. The more and harder Boreas blows, the tighter the man wraps his cloak; when the sun shines bright and hot, the man, of course, removes it.

         From the man's point of view, however, either way he's ultimately doing what some minor deity wants him to do, even if in basking in the sunshine he's doing what he immediately wants to do. But let's move to the point of view of the flies.

         I'm not old enough to have ever seen people try to kill flies by putting out honey or vinegar, nor even old enough to remember flypaper. I do, though, remember fly ribbon, also called fly capture tape: "a fly-killing device made of paper coated with a sweetly fragrant, but extremely sticky and sometimes poisonous substance that traps flies and other flying insects when they land upon it. "

         You can spray insecticide and kill flies efficiently (until they mutate and you get immune populations), and you can try to smash flies with newspapers. It's arguably more effective, if esthetically pretty nasty, to capture and poison, or capture and starve to death, flies with sweet sticky stuff.

         I have been thinking about such things because I have a "Rewards!" coupon from Office Depot that expires shortly, one for $24.48, and I will almost undoubtedly go to Office Depot and cash it in and buy computer printing cartridges I don't really need yet.

         And there's a fair chance that while in the store I'll see something I don't need at all but will come to want and will buy.

         That is, of course, the whole idea. If coupons really got customers to spend less money, companies wouldn't give them out.

         Like most people, I prefer to be warmed by the sun on a mild day rather than be blasted by the North Wind. Like most people, more relevantly, I prefer to be bribed rather than coerced.

         Still, I don't like to be manipulated, and I am quite certain that the bribe from Office Depot — or the Kroger Corporation or Bed, Bath, and Beyond — will end up costing me one way or another, even if, to my surprise, the coupons and other deals end up saving me money.

         'Cause unless you're Scrooge McDuck and get your kicks rolling around in money, money itself isn't your goal. What we want are the things money can buy, and for me, one of the major things money buys is some of my freedom and sense of control.

         Mainly, money buys freedom from money worries that are endemic to most strata of capitalist society. Having modest but secure income, and being careful with my money — not cheap but definitely tight — I've been able to live most of my life not having to worry much about not having money. I also haven't had to worry about just how to invest and conserve my fortune since having a modest but secure income I didn't have enough money to invest and conserve.

         It has made little sense, and continues to make little sense, for me to sacrifice any of my time to money issues to save a few bucks.

         Ah, but that $24.48 coupon is a temptation. Cheap people don't want to spend money; we tightwads will spend, but we get very upset if we waste money, and some place buried deep in my brain, probably just north of the limbic system, there's a small set of over-trained ganglia convinced that not cashing in a coupon for $24.48 is wasting $24.48 and — and those brain cells are sending out the neurological equivalent of "The horror! The horror!"

         I finally gave in to the Kroger Corporation, so I have a Ralphs card — Kroger's in the West is Ralphs — and also a card from Von's, another grocery chain; grocery stores make you an offer very difficult to refuse: you either allow them to track your purchases or you pay significantly more for their products. Freedom is valuable to me, but not paying $4 extra per pound of shrimp, which was the bit of extortion that got me to finally give in and get the card.

         I have done this much however, especially since shopping at a supermarket has become a rat-running exercise in figuring out a maze, as the rat: I make a shopping list of basics and try to buy the same basics every time, with only minor variations. So KrogerCorp can track my purchases, but the data, I hope, will bore even a computer program.

         "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" and, all things considered it's better to be bribed than coerced. Still, with all the PR people, advertisers, politicians, and propagandists trying to get our votes and our money and our "hearts and minds" — I'd just as soon do without both for. Or, if I had to choose, I think I might prefer an outright threat (if nonviolent) to a bribe.

         On the other hand, I pass Office Depot fairly regularly, and $24.48 is almost twenty-five dollars ….