the yes men say no

By Mark | October 27, 2004

Hopefully, the performance-art pranksters the Yes Men will get some serious press for their most recent stunt… After touring the country for the past few weeks sarcastically campaigning for Bush as a group called Yes, Bush Can, they’ve now issued a press release, under the name of said organization, stating that, knowing what they know now, they cannot continue to endorse him. Not only will “Yes, Bush Can” no longer be campaigning for Bush, we are told that the organization will henceforth be referred to as, “No, Bush Can’t.” Here’s the press release… I really hope some news sources buy it.

BUSH CAMPAIGN GROUP ENDORSES KERRY
“Yes, Bush Can” now says “no, Bush can’t!”

Yes, Bush Can, an independent group dedicated to communicating Bush policies directly to the public, has abandoned its campaign and is officially endorsing John Kerry for President.

Before changing sides, the Yes, Bush Can team drove around the country supporting the President in a campaign bus they had equipped with sound and light systems, confetti cannons, and various props and costumes. They gave dozens of stump speeches, distributed campaign videos and “USA Patriot Pledges,” and performed patriotic songs to audiences across the country.

Last week, the group officially split with Bush. “In the course of our travels, we ended up learning more about Bush’s policies than he wanted us to know,” said Harmon Spellmeyer, one of the Yes, Bush Can team. “We came to see that this administration is a catastrophe for most people.”

Before breaking with Bush, the Yes, Bush Can team worked earnestly to support him. They went to the Pacific Northwest to promote Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative–and discovered it was enabling the logging industry to cut down our last old-growth forests. They visited a nuclear power plant in Ohio to promote Bush’s domestic security policies–and found no one in the guard booth to meet them.
In western Pennsylvania, while promoting the President’s energy policy, they learned that it allows coal emissions which kill 23,000 people a year. Finally, while defending Bush’s war on terrorism, they found out that even Donald Rumsfeld feels the Iraq War has made the world a more dangerous place.

After many similar discoveries and much internal turmoil, the Yes, Bush Can group arrived at the difficult conclusion that they could no longer continue their work. At a press conference Tuesday, in order to demonstrate how profoundly they are rejecting their former boss’s ideas and policies, the team defaced and abandoned the bus they had purchased and outfitted.

Until the election, the former Bush campaigners will be doing all they can to make sure that Bush is prevented from winning the presidency. They will be joining many thousands of others in going door-to-door to “get out the vote” in cities throughout Florida– beginning with Jacksonville, a mostly Black city where 11,000 votes were never counted in 2000. (Statewide, 179,000 votes weren’t counted, more than half of them Black. 90% of Blacks voted for Gore.)

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gardening at night

By Mark | October 26, 2004

As long as I was home with a cold this afternoon, I thought I might as well try calling a few of the people on my “Please, Please Vote for John Kerry” list. One of the folks I got through to was an elderly man, a veteran. He was probably at least eighty years old. He told me that he’d never voted before because he was afraid that he’d have to serve on jury duty if he did. Well, this year he registered. He said that he’d serve on jury duty every day for the rest of his life for the chance to vote against Bush.

A friend just confided something very strange to me, and I feel as though I have to share it. Here it is:

I had my first “making out with John Edwards” dream last night. I kept worrying about Elizabeth Edwards. He was also trying to sell me a very expensive vest from some South American country… I’m not one of those women who thinks Edwards is “HOT”. I guess we can’t control our subconscious. I once had a dream that Donald Trump was dropping quarters down the back of my pants. I certainly don’t find him attractive.

I want to post a photo of her to go along with the quote (to prove that I really do have a “friend,” and it isn’t really me daydreaming about Trump stuffing change into my slacks), but I don’t think she would let Linette and me stay at her place when we visit Chicago any more if I did… Oops, I hope I haven’t said too much. Please forget that I mentioned Chicago.

OK, I need to go have dinner now and go to bed. I’m tired, and I’m still feeling a little sick. I probably shouldn’t have, but I went out canvassing again tonight. It was my only chance to train a new guy who wanted to volunteer, so I had to do it. We got five more people — bringing our total for the precinct to about seventy-five. I want to get to 100 by Friday night. (Canvassing after dark, by the way, sucks. I hate knocking on the doors of strangers after dark. It brings back gruesome memories of when I was young and living in rural New Jersey, just off a tight bend in the road. Every couple of years there would be someone showing up on our doorstep at night, dripping blood and cradling a broken limb or two.)

The baby is on my lap. She’s beautiful. I was just having a panic attack and I think she’s cured it. (She may have caused it too, but I don’t plan to focus on that so much.)

Good night my invisible friends.

* This post was brought to you by the 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq.

Posted in Mark's Life | 7 Comments

fuck, fuck, fuck, not peel

By Mark | October 26, 2004

I’m home sick from work with a cold today (too much canvassing out in the cold rain, I guess), so I can blog… Unfortunately, it’s bad news that I have to blog about this morning – bad news for the music-loving world in general, bad news for me specifically – John Peel is dead. I just got word from Kez and it’s depressed the hell out of me. Not only was Peel the biggest public supporter of my one-day-a-year band, the Monkey Power Trio, he was also one hell of a nice guy. He will be sorely missed.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of hearing the good-natured Mr. Peel before, we have some outtakes on the Monkey Power Trio site… I think I speak for the rest of the band when I say that our upcoming record will be dedicated to his memory. In an era where Ashlee Simpson and her pre-packaged and focus-grouped ilk pass for music, Mr. Peel was a beacon of hope. It fucking sucks that he’s dead… but I don’t blame him for leaving.

Goodbye, Mr. Peel. Say hello to Hendrix for me.

Posted in Art and Culture | 10 Comments

dude, your party’s been hijacked

By Mark | October 26, 2004

By now, you might have seen the Errol Morris vignettes featuring Republicans who aren’t supporting Bush, or perhaps even read a story or two about the conservative newspapers that have chosen not to endorse Bush. Some might say that the rats are fleeing a sinking ship, but I think that analogy doesn’t reflect the reality of the matter, which is that Bush, people are beginning to realize, is not practicing good, old-fashioned Republican conservatism. And even the most staunch party loyalists are beginning to take notice. Today, the magazine The American Conservative came out against Bush’s reelection. They did so in part for strategic reasons (they think that Kerry will be easy to beat in ’08, after spending a term undoing Bush’s global mess), but they also did so because they know he’s serving the interests of the evangelical right, and not those of this country. Their editorial, while anything but kind toward Kerry, is absolutely merciless toward Bush. I would ask any of you who consider yourselves Republicans to take a moment and read it. In my opinion, it’s one of the better endorsements, or non-endorsements, that’s out there right now. (And, dad, if you read it, I’ll buy you a steak or something of equal value.) Here is an excerpt:

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing clich

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

kids are absorbant

By Mark | October 25, 2004

A few weeks ago, I was stuck in the car during the Diane Rhem Show. While I usually can’t stand the sound of her voice, she was talking with a professor of Sociology at Boston College who had just written a book called, “Born to Buy” (Scribner), and I found it compelling. The woman, Juliet Schor, if I remember correctly, had taken a sabbatical to join an advertising firm that had a division devoted specifically to the tween and pre-tween markets. What she found, after having sat though a few months of meetings with them, while not exactly unexpected, is troublesome. Here are a few clips from reviews, as well as a link to the NPR interview.

Amazon synopsis:
Over the last fifteen years children’s spending power has mushroomed to an estimated USD30 billion in direct purchases and another USD600 billion of influence over parental purchases. Advertising and marketing has exploded alongside expenditures and now totals more than USD12 billion a year. Ads targeted at children are virtually everywhere – in schools, museums and on the internet – and strategies for capturing the child wallet have become ever more sophisticated. Marketers are intruding into a child’s most private space, organizing stealthy peer-to-peer viral marketing efforts, and using high tech scientific research methodologies. Together, these trends have led to a pervasive commercialization of childhood in the West. By eighteen months babies can recognize logos, by two they ask for products by brand name. During their nursery school years children will request an average of twenty-five products a day, by the time they enter primary school the average child can identify 200 logos and children between the ages of six and twelve spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation. On the basis of first-hand research inside the advertising industry, BORN TO BUY lays bare the research, messages and marketing strategies being used to target children, and assesses the impact of those efforts.

Review from Publisher’s Weekly:
According to consumerism and economics expert Schor (The Overspent American), the average 10-year-old has memorized about 400 brands, the average kindergartner can identify some 300 logos and from as early as age two kids are “bonded to brands.” Some may call it brainwashing, others say it’s genius; regardless of how you see it, the approach is the same: target young kids directly and consistently, appeal to them and not the adults in their lives…

We’ve tried, up until now, to keep Clementine logo-free, but it’s a challenge. It’s especially difficult as most of the clothes that we like, that are in our price range, carry some kind of word-mark or logo. I was just flipping through pictures to see if I could find an instance of our having let our guard down and I found one without much effort… This is an early example of Clementine co-branding with Old Navy.

It’s a bit scary how these things begin worming their ways into your lives.

Posted in Marketing | 15 Comments