TWO THINGS, PERHAPS RELATED
1. Remember after September 11, 2001 how everyone was raw and sensitive? How, everywhere you looked, there was a reminder of the planes and the towers and terrorism and all? And if you think really hard, maybe you recall that there was a Starbucks ad that caused some controversy around that time–a print ad that featured a dragonfly buzzing around two iced drinks with the tag line, “Collapse into cool.” A number of people claimed that the image was too, too reminiscent of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and that, in fact, Starbucks was capitalizing on the images of September 11 to drive drink sales. [I know, I know: I was trained to pick apart things like that, to read into ads and essays and whatnot, and even I didn’t see it.]
Well, yesterday I caught sight of a TV ad (I forget for what) featuring something much more graphic and direct: a plane cutting a wild swath through the sky, with folks in the plane’s cargo bay dumping money out of the back. Three years after the fact, the ad’s images of people on the ground, engulfed by paper falling thick as snow, made me stop in my tracks–and I’m not what anyone would call the sentimental type. And I thought to myself, “Where are the Starbucks protesters now?”
2. My friend David forwarded me the text of a speech given by Larry Kramer at Cooper Union a couple of weeks ago. It’s typical Kramerspeak: judgmental, enraged, enraging, earnest (at times, embarrassingly so), wrought with conspiracy theories and vast, ludicrous generalizations, though as with so many polemic types (e.g. Camille Paglia), Kramer does manage to make a few good points.
But what interests me at least as much as Kramer’s arguments is when he’s making them: now, in the wake of the presidential election. And viewed side-by-side with the Starbucks example above, it gives me hope that, like the events of September 11, 2001, the tragedy of November 2, 2004 and the subsequent hysteria it’s engendered will eventually fade, and life will return to normal (whatever that is).
Of course, Kramer would say that such a reading is sloppy and lazy and gives me an excuse to remain sitting on my ass instead of turning my sadness into rage. And maybe he’d be right.
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