Phooey on you, brainless America.
Boy, oh, boy, did the big-wigs hit it big, selling us not only sneakers, burgers, insurance and batteries, but also slinging us the subliminal. We’re talking about those neotenous little bastards. You know, those cute, baby-faced-assassin spokesanimals that companies use to develop the ultimate, crafty, mind-f***ing strategy.
Unbeknownst to you, the consumer, you don’t grasp that these companies are consciously exploiting the loopholes of the unconscious.
Oh, it’s brilliant, I tell you, brilliant. Yes, the Geico Gecko is adorable and smooth-talking. But it’s important to remember he’s still a reptile, and the only quality the company shares with its slick spokesanimal is that it is, and always will be, cold-blooded.
In reality, that cute little gecko would have no problem telling you to get bent even though your car just got totaled, because that’s how corporations roll. But the whole purpose of the gecko is to make you think otherwise.
Everywhere you turn — poof! — a marauding band of company mascots prodding you to try this, buy that. Forget drugs. I D.A.R.E you to find a more pollutant influence on America — and American children — than cute company bobble-heads.
The embodiments of companies are born and live on through the Geico Gecko, the Energizer Bunny, Mr. Clean, Mr. Peanut, Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse and their ilk.
Ronald McDonald is America’s red-and-white-faced puppet dictator for corporate culture. He’s a fat-cat clown who cloaks his opportunism as philanthropy. Yeah, Ronald McDonald helps children across the globe; he helps them get fat, while at the same time fattening the wallets of billionaires.
No one will ever accuse Coca-Cola of having a social conscience. It channels St. Nicholas, polar bears and penguins into its Santa bag of carbonation, globalization and colonization. The largest beverage company in the world, Coca-Cola has been accused in the past of “drinking countries dry.” In 2004, the company used 283 billion liters of water.
Or how about the smiling face from Walmart?
He jumps around and lowers prices for you! Yes, just you! And other smiling customers? He probably says something like, “Oh my god, the prices are too damn high! I will lower the prices for you, and I do so by bouncing on prices, but what you don’t know is that I treat my employees like semi-intelligent slaves and buy cheap, second-class products from third-world countries! But, hey, why are you complaining? Aren’t the prices low?” Then he springs happily and chaotically into more bouncing.
Lest we keep going, like the Energizer Bunny. Do events like the Hawks Tunnel Nest Disaster and Bhopal Disaster sound positive to you, especially in a supposed eco-friendly environment? Didn’t think so. Well, I bet you also didn’t know that Union Carbide Corporation used to own Energizer before it divested it. But that didn’t stop the bunny from furiously marching on to the beat of its own drum.
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Then there’s the boyish charmer, Mickey Mouse, who exists as a moralistic caricature to absolve Walt of his anti-Semitic Disney empire. Anybody recall Donald Duck Hitler? But there’s a reason the whole Disney brand is embodied by a lofty tower — an unrepentantly ivory tower where all CEOs reside comfortably barricaded away from the greasy masses and the pawns who peddle their products.
See, CEOs employ these manipulators called marketing branches.
Their sole purpose: to trick you into buying, consuming and becoming products. Materialism is to the United States what communism is to China. But we’re all just a bunch of Nike-wearing fascists, exalting the product over the person. The product makes the person, and in China, people make our product.
Through it all, humans can’t think of a company as an unintelligible mass of people, stacked on top of each other in high-rise buildings, and sitting in neatly kept cubicles waiting to answer calls and dispense helpful information. But we can conceive a company as a singular body, one who shares our emotions, ethics and values.
But there’s no reason to suspect that, outside that little moderate-mannered lizard, the company shares a silly British accent, or more importantly, that good-natured, “lizard-next-door” attitude you long for.
Try as they might, companies are not singular representations of anthropomorphized lizards, talking mice or subdued polar bears casually drinking caffeine-infused products. They’re companies, unconcerned with you, but infatuated with your greenbacks.
In all this, it’s important to ask not what the company can do for you, but what you can do for the company.
