The Circle of Lies

Last edited Mon Apr 30, 2012, 07:44 AM - Edit history (1)

I am a TV-person. I used to be a book-person, but failing eyesight makes it more of a chore than I am willing to experience right now. So, I find myself watching tv. Truthfully, I have always loved tv. I still remember being "on the phone" with a best friend as we oohed & aaahed through episodes of Dr. Kildare or Ben Casey. ( For the really young ones here, they were the hottest guys around on tv, way-back-when).

But I digress... back to the lies.


Commercials have always been with us., Early on, we had Bess Myerson hawking refrigerators. ...............Speedy pushing Alka Seltzer.....Reddi selling kilowats....Josephine wanting to fix our plumbing, and so on.

These were friendly little spokes-icons, who seemed to only want to help us to buy just the right product for every need we had.

Were they lying to us then? Of course they were, to some degree. No one really thought that Bufferin was THAT much superior to Anacin or Bayer. We knew that Mr Clean's magical floor cleaner was probably not much better than any other cleaner we used on our floors (high heels optional).

We knew that Westinghouse v Frigidaire v Maytag v Kenmore was a "fight" between well-matched opponents, won by style & price.

Ads were apolitical then, except for true "election seasons", and when that happened, we KNEW we were being lied to by everyone putting up the ads.

Fast forward....

Any given day of TV-watching now exposes us to a plethora of "ads" that are anything BUT ads.

Remember when gasoline companies bragged about the performance of their products & how they would make your car perform better? You must be an old timer like me

Lately, oil companies are more "into" propaganda than product. Exxon would now have us believe that they are co-partners with education, conservation, health care, you name it.

The new spokespeople ("real-people/employees&quot who wax poetic about the exemplary teachers they had along the way who pointed them down the road to a job in petroleum. It's no accident that these people are often people of color, and more often than not, female.

It's the kinder-gentler face of fracking, drilling, polluting, price-gouging.

Then we have the lovely people of Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana regaling us with all their pie-in-the-sky exuberance about how wonderfully perfect things are after the oil spill, and how we all need to go there.

We've got the coal people bragging about how clean they are now, and how they can solve our energy problems.

All butterflies & rainbows.

The problem is that when actual products are advertised to us ad-nauseum, we can compare when we buy that product and test it our for ourselves, but when propagandistic perception is the "product" it gets "squishier".

Where are the ANTI-fracking "ads" to show the flipside? Where are the ads that show how $4.50 a gallon gas PAYS for the ads that try to get us to believe that oil companies are doing God's-work, and have only our best interests at heart.

That $4.50 a gallon we pay at the pump provides them with billions of pure profit every quarter, stratospheric CEO salaries, ultra-pricey legal teams who get work-arounds and years-long stalls for reparations ordered for pollution "events"...and what we get in return is clever "comfort" ads from them....but no relief on prices, no change in their business practices.

We are far enough down this road to pretty much know that we have to get off petroleum, but we also know that for now at least, we have few other options, so we are being squeezed to death, as the money we give them in fuel prices and subsidies is used to lobby against the very change we all need in order to even survive long term on this planet.

But we have the ads, and aren't they lovely?

As annoying as they are, the drug ads at least speed-talk the dreadful consequences of using the product they are selling.

Somehow, lies about yellow waxy build-up, do not compare with lies we are told now.