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Sinister herbicide ads
Thursday, May 27 1999
Last night I participated in my third desk change since beginning work for the firm. I, along with the rest of the guys and gals within our so-called "resource," were moved to a rather cramped room in the back. That didn't really bother me until this morning when I found that no one had bothered to ensure that we'd have network connections. Someone in either the "networking" or "operations" "resource" had seriously "dropped the ball" (as we say). At first I was angry and frustrated, complaining bitterly to the content boys. But then I went for a bike ride lasting over an hour, window-shopping for some sort of super-transportable writing option similar to Kim's new AlphaSmart
On the way home, as I entered the northernmost parts of Ocean Beach along West Point Loma Blvd., I came upon a box full of electronic gadgets set out on the curb in utter technologic rejection. Someone had stored these things in an attic until 1999 and then decided they were worthless. These gadgets included a DuoPhone 102 Electronic Telephone Amplifier System, a couple of rechargeable 12 volt batteries, one of them manufactured by YUASA sometime prior to 1987, and an old Atari 1200 XL personal computer, with the full 64 K of RAM. These were just the things I decided to take. Had I been half my age, I would have been in technologic rapture. But I'm older now and I know that an Atari 1200 XL, though it might have been the next-best-thing to a Commodore 64 back in the day, has only nostalgia value in the late 90s. But I'd never seen the guts of an Atari computer before, so the first thing I did when I got home was open the thing up.
In the years since Duran Duran, in the humid oceanic San Diego beach air, the steel metal radio-frequency shielding had uniformly rusted over in a patina of brown. I roughly pulled this aside like an impatient autopsist and poured over the chips, mostly with date codes from 1983. Everything was big, primary green and simple back then. A 16 year old kid with a soldering iron could cut copper traces on the two-level PC boards and solder wires to re-route the flow of digital circuits, spending whole summers customizing and tweaking the original cost-conscious designs into proprietary articulated memory spaces of... words fail me. But that's what I used to do with my VIC-20 and later my C-128. I had no social life when I was a teenager and I didn't even care. I'd be drawing truth tables in my notebooks on the bus ride to and from school, occasionally glancing over in unfocused interest at the sexual offerings of my female schoolmates. I fantasized about those girls for years afterwards, but I didn't need them.
In the evening, Kim and I were watching the teevee and I suddenly realized what it was that I found so unsettling in advertisements for Ortho Roundup herbicide. It has to do with the human capacity for sheer evil, to mutilate, destroy and kill those who are different from but just as alive and conscious as we. The Roundup advertisements I'm talking about feature a cast of animated plants, each talking to each other in low-class New York accents, the accent Americans associate with white criminals. The plants are talking about a plant-friend who has died after being sprayed by the product being promoted. These plants are genuinely sad for the loss of their friend, and they're justifiably worried about their own futures. The scene, though it's supposed to have an aura of comedy about it, strikes me as tragic, desperate and ominous, like the predicament of Jews during the holocaust. Though I'm supposed to hate these plants and find joy in their imminent demise, I feel nothing but sympathy for them. Unwittingly, in anthropomorphising these plants into darkly comic humanesque figures, Ortho has facilitated identifying with them. And having done so, the ad comes across as jarring, cold, and utterly offensive. Ortho is telling us that it's completely justifiable to kill plants, even those with human personalities. If I had children, I'd be concerned that their viewing this ad would compel them to pluck the wings off of flies, shoot BB guns at cats, and possibly cause problems with other children. Unfortunately, I'm sure the new lawn-loving, middle-class-placating V-chip doesn't have any filters for this sort of outrage, though it's about the only thing I'd be upset about children seeing.
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