CSotD: Selling our birthright for a glass of fermented pottage
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A generation ago, Abbie Hoffman joked that, when he stepped out onto the Moon, Neil Armstrong should have shouted "Drink Coca-Cola!" and retired a very wealthy man.
I guess you'd have to explain that to younger people today, and Joe Heller's cartoon about a Belgian-owned company capitalizing on our corrupted sense of patriotism is an apt, but sad, commentary on how flag-waving jingoism (in this case joined with extreme sexual fear and ignorance, a different but equally charming facet of our national image) has replaced actual values of freedom in our society.
"America" is simply a brand name open to trademark, like the names of things in a National Park, available to the highest bidder or, more often, the craftiest claimant. As that link suggests, losing the trademark was less a matter of law than of sloppy administration and an unwillingness to contest the seemingly flimsy justification for usurping the names.
At which point, let me change hobby horses in midstream:
I'm no fan of Grammar Nazis or, as Caulfied suggests, "Grammar Snobs." And the growing inability of people to use prepositions intelligently is distressing: Something can't be "based off of" something else because a base is a foundation.
I am, however, willing to swallow usage issues — I don't really care that Britons wait on lines we Yanks wait in — until we come to the ones that change meaning, and that article about Yosemite drops my pet peeve into a pair of consecutive sentences:
"If the Park had realized that its vendors were filing for intellectual property protection, it may have stepped in much earlier to challenge ownership. It may be more difficult to challenge an intellectual property registration that has already issued."
Had it realized it, it might have stepped in. But we know it didn't. "May have stepped in" means we don't know if it did or not, just as we're not sure if "it may be more difficult to challenge …"
We know it didn't step in, dammit. We just don't know how to use language to communicate.
Sorry. We now return to our previously scheduled rant.
We also know that the American public didn't step in when, for instance, the American flag was turned into a cheap marketing tool.
That same Abbie Hoffman, at about the time he was joking about commercializing the Moon Landing, had some post-production work added when he took off his fringe jacket on a memorable 1970 broadcast episode of the Merv Griffin Show to reveal an American flag shirt.
Though if he'd been built like Raquel Welch, perhaps it wouldn't have been so controversial. I don't recall any objections to her costume, though the movie itself didn't earn any Oscars or even many ticket sales, so maybe nobody saw what the patriotically half-garbed Myra did in her flag bikini. (They wouldn't have allowed it in North Carolina, I can tell you.)
That aside, by 1970, the flag had already been declared a symbol of loyalty to the government, and I remember some controversy from Vietnam veterans among others when state and local governments began adding it to their uniforms. The flag was federal, they insisted, but to little effect.
And while burning it was disrespectful, the days when you didn't allow it to touch the ground, fly in the rain, become tattered or be handed out in the form of cheap parade souvenirs to be dropped in the gutter ended.
As for using it for advertising …
(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.
We aren't arguing over what you are; we're just dickering over your price.
And if they can do it to the flag, why not turn the whole country into an ad?
Unless you're one of those commie socialists who doesn't like good AmericanTM beer!
Meanwhile, back at the parental helo-pad
Between Friends returns to a topic previously touched upon when Kim's son headed off for college, which is location and oversight.
My kids chose colleges within that aforementioned four hour drive, which I liked because it meant that they could come back for holidays but they were far enough away that they had to do their own laundry, a limit Kim hasn't been too strict about.
In fact, there was a brief but very funny arc on Kim's helicopter-tendencies just last month.
I have had conversations about this, particularly with the son who was in the Navy and spent several years in Japan with sidetrips to the Gulf, Russia, Korea and a variety of other places, several aspects of which I didn't hear about until much later, since phone calls were rare and expensive in those days.
Doonesbury has also touched on the issue of deployed soldiers Skyping and getting swept up in family matters amid the bombs and bullets, but, even without that extreme in issues of distraction, a little distance and automony is a good thing.
Then again, it's easy to pontificate when you didn't have the options anyway. I come from a generation in which Peace Corps volunteers disappeared into a black hole for those years, but my little sister, only eight years younger, even got to visit her blogging-and-emailing-and-Skyping Peace Corps daughter in Thailand.
A daughter who reports that, yeah, they got some pushback from the Old Guard over not disappearing into the aforementioned black hole.
It's a new world, with new boundaries to be set.
Still, I hope Susan's daughter either picks Simon Fraser or Memorial. It would be good for both of them.
Heck, it can't be too far if it all fits on a cocktail coaster.
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