Top Ten Reasons Why Advertising is the Work of Satan and Turning Us All Into Drooling Morons

1) Critical thinking? I call that stinking thinking! Advertising sez "unplug your brain and buy what we tell you." Just do it!

2) Attention teachers! Tired of swimming upstream and teaching your students how to think? We know you are! There you are in front of the mob--with no fancy graphics, effects and camera angles to keep the little brain dead bastards interested. Take heart! We'll sell you edutainment packets. Your students can learn the scientific method--comparing the thickness of Ragu and Prego!

3) Businesses competing on the basis of advertising and marketing--not on who has the best product or service.

4) Unscrewable pooches--that's right! You can't screw these pooches, from Windows 95 to some godawful stinker of a movie, because we freaking well advertise with you, and if you don't say something nice about us, we pull the ad. We want advertorial--we want "ink or air" for our ad--and if you can't say something nice...don't say it at all!

Somebody shoot that messenger...

5) Target marketing--direct to the frontal lobe! There's nothing like creating a new group to sell new stuff--or more of the old stuff that you've creatively repackaged. Flush all cultural consensus down the toilet and think of yourself as: a biker: a rightwing Christian, a lesbian radical hang-glider...etc. Magazines and electronic media targeted to YOUR group will tell you exactly what to think, buy, wear and do. It's easy!

6) Old is bad--new is good. Gotta sell the new stuff--and that includes ideas! We know this means all the good titles go out of print and the megabookstores choke up with offal--but that's progress!

7) Politicians are products. Like him or not, McGinniss was right, after all. Remember when "The Selling of the President 1968" was a shocker? Ah, sweet youth...

8) Beefed-up production values mean...no bottom rungs on the ladder! Have fun with your 'zines and homevideo--yer not even showing up on the radar, kids! Alternative music? We'll find a way to turn any "alternative" you come up with into something to package and sell; from rock, to punk, to grunge, to rap--welcome to the machine, babe! (The disk can sound raw...but it better be studio quality!) Mags mean 4-color glossy, slick and squeaky...forget the writing...it's the photography...the look! When it comes to movies, let's see how much we can spend, blowing up the bubble, South Sea style. Can you say Imax? And, of course, somebody has to pay for this...

9) You do! Every namebrand product has a bullshit subsidy tax; and what they're really paying for is the right to put their bullshit in YOUR brain!

10) This is Maggie's Farm, and neither am I out of it. While the avant garde argues about this fine point or that...we're busy stringing the barbed wire through the country of your soul. Painters, writers, filmmakers, cartoonists, voice character actors, musicians, live actors...how much of your time, how much of your brain is spent pushing somebody's bullshit...how little spent doing what you're really supposed to do? When you do your real stuff you're stealing the time...ain't you? Get back to work and SELL, boy. We ain't paying you to do your own thing here.