JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2007
Note to Self: Become a Phony Corporate
“People Are Smart,” lies the new service mark of Ditech.com, a widely vilified mortgage company.
Ditech’s web site elaborates: “People are smart. This isn’t
an opinion. It’s a fact. People are
smart. It’s our mind that kept us from becoming dinner for prehistoric
carnivores. It’s our intellect that enabled us to place a robot on a planet a
couple hundred million miles away. And it's our ability to apply knowledge that
tells us it's not a good idea to stick a fork in a light socket. Or fry bacon
in the nude for that matter. When you stop to think about it, proof of our
smart [sic] is everywhere. We prove theorems. We build skyscrapers. We buy low
and sell high. We cure diseases. We split atoms. And if we’re really smart, we
split aces and eights. It's true—people are smart. And it’s the customer’s
smart [sic] that we respect and strive to live up to; because people know what
they want in life. They know what’s best for them and their family. And they
know that if we offer competitive home mortgages and smart financial solutions,
together, we can make the most of our smart [sic]. That is, if we’re smart
about it.”
Of course, another thing we can do
with our “smart” is scam the living hell out of each other, which is what this
sort of pandering is all about. If people really were smart, a company like
ditech could not convince people with TV ads that contain a screenful of
impossible-to-read qualifying fine print for less than two seconds. If people
really were smart, there would not have been a sub-prime mortgage crisis at
all; ditech would not have been repeatedly sued for its business practices, and
its parent company, GMAC, would not be attempting to scare people into buying
its services with “false and misleading” ads.1
Flatter you for being smart while
treating you like an idiot—it’s classic con-artist behavior. This ludicrous
conflation of card game strategy, pain response and interplanetary technology
into a definition of “smart” that synonymizes with “know[ing] what they want in
life” shows its true colors in its very cynical triviality. Like everything in
modern consumer capitalism, its supposed philosophy is simply con-man’s patter
distracting you from its real mission of squeezing you for every last nickel.
Casual lies, deception and fraud are acceptable as the core of the modern
economy, and it’s why we’re never going to have a functioning democracy or a
rational citizenry.
The most repulsive irony is how the
economy treats actual smart people, crushing them, then looting their corpses
for costumery businesses can use to give themselves a patina of intellectual
capital. (This is the way the economy treats all minorities, of course.) I have
lost jobs literally and solely for being too smart. Then I get a tap on the
shoulder from some half-wit company attempting to lure me into buying its
product so I might feel smart.
Loving the fiction and hating the
reality: that is the mantra of modern life, where the authentic is deprecated
because it is unprofitable.
Ditech and its ilk are aimed largely at an under-educated
demographic. But the most grating version of this intellectual three-card monte
is the sort aimed at condo-owning, PBS-watching half-brights who already equate
their paycheck with intelligence.
A classic example is a recent TV ad
for the BMW 3 Series cars. Dripping with pomposity and faux historicism, the ad
explains how the car line has been a top award-winner for years, then compares
it favorably against various monarchs who reigned for shorter periods. The
monarchs are not all famous, so there is a pretense of scholarship.
There is also this claim: “Joan of
Arc reigned for only one year.”
Joan, of course, did not “reign” at
all. She was a self-appointed general in service of the French regent, who was
coronated as a result of her victories.
Perhaps you really are better than
everybody else if you drive a BMW. But BMW isn’t better than Joan—or Wikipedia,
for that matter. I say that if you see a 3 Series today, burn it at the stake.2
A similar poseur is Levenger, a
hoity-toity pen-and-paper company with the motto, “Tools for Serious Readers.”
I consider myself a serious reader,
and have never found reading to require any tools, though I have read wrenching
books and a few authors I’d like to hammer. Still, there was Levenger’s summer
catalogue in the bathroom, so I decided to have a flip-through.
I’m not exactly sure where the
frenzied disgust began. Maybe it was the $54 Boston Public Library canvas
bookbag—illustrated as a firewood-holder, with flames blazing in the
background.
Disturbing as the “Fahrenheit 451”
aesthetic might be, it was extant material that was really annoying. Levenger
sells a lot of speciality notepads and journals. Most in the catalogue were
depicted in photos with sample writing on them.
One on the catalogue cover was
actually promising: a wallet card note reading, “Hall of Mosses trail— .75
round trip.” That’s a reference to Washington State’s Olympic National Park,
and it even gets the trail length right.
But inside was a plethora of notes
suggestive of people very different from bookish intellectuals. There was, for
example, this note pictured with a line of pens “modeled after a high-tech
running shoe” (including the smell?):
“Business
Phone Calls
call Seattle
office re:
Friday’s
fax on product
specs.
* call Protocol
company about
statistical
analysis
….”
And so the notes continue throughout
the catalogue, reminding someone of “team luncheons,” “web meetings” and the
analysis of “forecast models.” Tools for Serious Middle-Managers is more like
it.
The notes read the same way on the
home front, where somebody apparently needs to give their personal architect a
ring, hire a lawn service and “Go to wine tasting. Pick up groceries.”
Rounding out the aesthetic are the
“Music to Download” notes that appear in various illustrations. Serious readers
listen to (collectively):
“Joss Stone
—Change
—Proper Nice
—What We Were
Thinking
Van Morrison
—Domino
Daughtry—
It’s Not Over
Dave Matthews—
Smooth Rider.”
I suppose to most people, being
middle-class and having some business degree equates with intelligence. But
then, People Are Stupid.SM And where Levenger really gets annoying
is where its little pictures move from the merely corporate into the
pseudo-intellectual.
A transitional fossil of this monstrosity is a little wallet note where someone keeps track of their $3,500 alongside, “‘He listens well who takes notes.’—Dante.” The out-of-context truism, literature reduced to self-help banality—that is the mark of the pseudo-smart.
From the Sly Stallone school of sounding smart, we have 3-by-5 index cards illustrated as flash cards for samplings from a copy of “Words That Make a Difference.” The word that our serious reader is learning is “meticulous.” What serious reader doesn’t know “meticulous”? Poring over a catalogue with a magnifying glass like a deranged crank is a living definition of “meticulous.”
This pattern continues on Levenger’s Web site, which offers a word of the day. The day I looked, the word was “vector.” I use “vector” very frequently in its physics meaning, mostly while muttering to myself about some stranger who is clearly going to cross my path as I walk. But Levenger’s definition of “vector” did not include the physics meaning. It gave solely the biological meaning of a carrier of disease. That is to say, it was incomplete and inaccurate, a sort of basic training for maybe reading the New York Times or something.
The catalogue also contains journals and letters. I found it exciting because it gives the vague air of snooping even though it’s just a commercial. I thought perhaps the designers snuck something intriguing into such long-form narratives.
Instead, I got a sense of what a 12-year-old might have to say about a book in one fake journal entry:
“Just finished reading a great book. I
always feel a little bit let down when I
finish a truly fascinating novel. Maybe it
sounds odd, but the more I love the story,
the harder it is to say good-bye to it. In
[…] case, the novel is We Were the
[…] by Joyce Carol Oates. She has
[…] talent for creating
[…] have such depth.”
The more you love a story, the harder it is to set it aside. How peculiar! It demands a paradigm shift in psychology!
Name-dropping a quality author is par for the course. The same thing happens in the illustration for the ultra-pretentious “Bookography” product in which important people are to memorialize books they have read or want to read. While it is photographed next to a copy of Stephen King’s “On Writing” (Or, The Appropriation of AC/DC Lyrics and Lovecraft Motifs), the book written in the journal is Owen Gingrich’s “The Book Nobody Read”—ironically for this catalogue, a well-regarded study in marginal notes (and a likely epithet for leather-bound tomes decorating the homes of many a Levenger patron).
This goony, goofy mingling of serious bibliophilia and air-headedness continues in another journal illustration:
“and as we inched our way closer and closer,
I became nervous about what I would say
[…] her. I know that this is silly, after
[…] a book signing, right? I’ve been
to see […] readings and signings, but this time
was […] different! Mark was with me,
[…] as […] and excited, of course. When
we were finally at the front of the line—on
deck! the most hilarious thing happened:”
Let me guess: Mark’s BlackBerry battery exploded and burned his left nipple off!
The rich person whose brain is badly in need of some Mrs. Dash is at work in letters as well. This one was popular enough to appear twice:
“Dear Jeffrey,
Looking forward to our sailing
expedition. The weather should
be great. The last few […]
the weather has been […]
The water is [….]”
Levenger, like ditech and BMW, undoubtedly hires other firms to make its ads. But surely its also reviews them in detail and approves of their contents. So Levenger must know that it actually is selling Props for People Who Pretend to Be Serious Readers.
The whole aesthetic of this catalogue is about as serious as the second decimal point on a corporate boss’ paycheck.
And the last thing I need is my “smart” sucked out and sold back to me in a gilded box.
1 “GMAC’s home lending arm hit
with lawsuits” by Lisa R. Schoolcraft, Atlanta (Georgia) Business Chronicle,
Jan. 7, 2005, at http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2005/01/10/story4.html;
“DA charges firm’s claims don’t add up” by Dennis Taylor, Silicon Valley/San
Jose Valley Business Journal, Jan. 2, 1998, at http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1998/01/05/story4.html?jst=cn_cn_lk;
“Desperate Measures for the Mortgage Business” by Jon Birger,
“Fortune,” June 18, 2007, at http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/15/news/companies/pluggedin_birger_mortgage.fortune/index.htm.
It appears none of the lawsuits were successful. For a competitor’s
perspective, see http://smartmortgageadvice.wordpress.com/2007/06/21/extreme-mortgage-company-makeover.
2 A
truly valid comparison is that Joan was in part executed for cross-dressing,
while this ad is certainly in “smart” drag.
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