A Talk on Advertising Herman Wouk An Afier-Dinner Oration by The Artist Marquis, while you were talking I looked around this table and saw that (nearly) everyone here earns a living through the activity called advertising. Now, I realize that you invited me in the absence, enforced by your sedentary ways, of stuffed tiger heads or other trophies on your walls, a live artist being the equivalent of a dead beast as a social omament. I will not question your motive because it has given me a chance to do a beautiful and good thing. I should like to entreat all these gentlemen to redeem the strange, bittersweet miracle of their lives, while there is yet time, by giving up the advertising business at once. Has it ever occurred to any of you gentlemen to examine the peculiar fact that you find bread in your mouths daily? How does this happen? Who is it that you have persuaded to feed you? The obvious answer is that you buy your food, but this just states the question in another, less clear way, because money is nothing but a token of exchange. Drop the confusing element of money from the whole process, and the question I've posed must confront you bleakly. What is it that you do, that entitles you to eat? A shoemaker gives shoes for his bread. Well. A singer sings for her supper. Well. A capitalist leads a large enterprise. Well. A pilot flies, a coal-miner digs, a sailor moves things, a minister preaches, an author tells stories, a laundryman washes, an auto worker makes cars, a painter makes pictures, a street-car conductor moves people, a stenographer writes down words, a lumberjack saws, and a tailor sews. The people with the victuals appreciate these services and cheerfully feed the performers. But what does an advertising man do? He induces human beings to want things they don’t want. Now, I will be deeply obliged if you will tell i 1 D me by what logic anybody can be convinced that your activity the eaten 2 want where want does not exist—is eames wom, a useful one and should be . rather, the worst ischii deserving to be starved into extinction? Sort of mischief, Scanned by CamScannerHERMAN WOUK 38 None of you, however, is anything but well-fed ; yet I am sure that until this moment it has never occurred to you on what a dubious pasis your feeding is accomplished. I shall tell you exactly how you eat. You induce people to use more things than they naturally desire— the more useless and undesirable the article, the greater the advertising effort needed to dispose of it—and in all the profit from that unnatural purchasing, you share. You are fed by the makers of undesired things, who exchange these things for food by means of your arts and give you your share of the haul. Lest you think I oversimplify, I give you an obvious illustration. People naturally crave meat ; so the advertising of meat is on a negligible scale. However, nobody is born craving tobacco, and even its slaves instinctively loathe it. So the advertising of tobacco is the largest item of expense in its distribution. It follows, of course, that advertising men thrive most richly in the service of utterly useless commodities like tobacco or underarm pastes, or in a field where there is a hopeless plethora of goods, such as soap or whisky. But the great evil of advertising is not that itis unproductive and wasteful ; were it so, it would be no worse than idleness. No. Advertising blasts everything that is good and beautiful in this land with a-horrid spreading mildew. It has tarnished Creation. What is sweet to any of you in this world? Love? Nature? Art? Language? Youth? Behold them all, yoked by advertising in the harness of commerce. Aurora Dawn! Has any of you enough of a ear for English to realize what a crime against the language is that (trade) name? Aurora is the down! The redundancy should assail your ears like the shriek of a bad hinge. But you are so numbed by habit that it conveys no offence. So it is with all your barbarities. Shakespeare used the thyming of ‘double’ and ‘bubble’ to create two immortal lines in Macbeth. You use it to help sell your Dubl-Bubl Shampoo, and you have not the slightest sense of doing anything. ‘wrong. Should someone tell you that language is the Promethean fire that lifts man above the animals and that you are smothering the flame in mud, you would Stare. You are staring. Let me tell you without images, then that are cheapening speech until it is ceasing to be an honest method of exchange, and that the people, not knowing that the English i ‘1 Tadio commercial is meant to be a lie and the English in the President’ Speech which follows, a truth, will in the end fall into a paralysing Scanned by CamScanner36 UNIVERSITY ENGLISH SELECTIONS scepticism in which all utterance will be disbelieved. God made a great green wonderland when he spread out the span Of the United States. Where is the square mile inhabited by men wherein’ advertising has not drowned out the land’s meek hymn with the blare of billboards? By what right do you turn Nature into a painted hag crying ‘Come buy’? A few heavenly talents brighten the world in each generation. Artistic inspiration is entrusted to weak human beings who can be tempted with gold. Has advertising scrupled to buy up the holiest of these gifts and set them to work peddling? And the traffic in lovely youth! By the Lord, gentlement, I would close every advertising agency in the country tomorrow, if only to head off the droves of silly girls, sufficiently cursed with beauty, who troop into the cities each month, most of them to be stained and scarred, a few to find ashy success in the hardening life of a model! When will a strong voice call a halt to this dismal pilgrimage, this Children’s Crusade to the Unholy Land? When will someone denounce the snaring allurements of the picture magazines? When will someone tell these babies that for each girl who grins on a magazine cover a hundred weep in back rooms, and that even the grin is a bought and forced thing that fades with the flash of the photographer's bulb, leaving a face grim with scheming or heartbreak? To what end is all this lying, vandalism and misuse? You are trying to sell ; never mind what, never mind how, never mind to whom—just sell, sell, sell! Small wonder that in good old American slang ‘sell’ means ‘fraud’! Come now! Do you hesitate to promise requited love to miserable girls, triumph to failures, virility to | weaklings, even prowess to little children, for the price of a mouth wash ora breakfast food? Does it ever occur to you to be ashamed to live by preying on the myriad little tragedies of unfulfilment which make your methods pay so well? : I trust that I am offending everybody very deeply. An artist has the privileges of the court fool, you know. I paint because I see with aseeing eye, and eye that familiarity never glazes. Advertising strikes me as it would a man from Mars and as it undoubtedly appears to the angels : an occupation the aim of which is subtle prevarication for gain, and the effect of which is the blighting of everything fair and ai a Scanned by CamScannerpl HERMAN WOUK 37 easant in our time with the garish fungus of greed. If I have made all of you, or just one of you, repent of this career and determine to seek decent work, I will not have breathed in vain today. oration sedentary ways lumberjack extinction dubious plethora mildew behold yoked Prometheus smothering paralysing scepticism hymn bill boards traffic crusades Prevarication GLOSSARY a formal speech spending much of the time seated a person who cuts down trees for a living ruin or destruction doubtful or questionable plenty or excess destructive growth of tiny fungi forming on plants, leather, food, etc. in warm and damp conditions look, notice bound, linked or tied to a mythical character who stole fire from heaven suffocating, suppressing rendering helpless doubt sacred song or music advertisements displayed on boards immoral and illegal trade religious battle in the Middle Ages led by Christian rulers to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims evading the truth Scanned by CamScannerThe Civilization of To-day C.E.M. Joad Praise of our civilization : order and safety 1. First and foremost there are order and safety. If to-day I have a quarrel with another man, I do not get beaten merely because I am physically weaker and he can knock me down. I go to law, and the law will decide as fairly as it can between the two of us. Thus in disputes between man and man right has taken the place of might. Moreover, the law protects me from robbery and violence. Nobody may come and break into my house, steal my goods or run off with my children. Of course there are burglars, but they are very rare, and the law punishes them whenever it catches them. 2. It is difficult for us to realize how much this safety means. Without safety those higher activities of mankind which make up civilization could not go on. The inventor could not invent, the scientists find out or the artists make beautiful things. Hence order and safety, although they are not themselves civilization, are things without which civilization would be impossible. They are as necessary to our civilization as the air we breathe is to us : and we have grown so used to them that we do not notice them any more than we notice the air. 3. For all that, they are both new things and rare things. Except for a short period under the Roman Empire, there have been order and safety in Europe only during the last two hundred years, and even during that time there have been two revolutions and a great many wars ; thus it is a great achievement of our civilization that to-day civilized men should in their ordinary daily lives b i e ti from the fear of violence. Y i Health 4. They are also largely free from the fear of pain. They still feel u ; became common, i i longer ie terrible thing it used to be. And people pee pla ee ten 0 be healthy, is not to be Civilized—savages are often health: igh not so often as is usually supposed—but unless you have Scanned by CamScannerC.E.M.JOAD 59 1 good health, you cannot enjoy anything or achieve anything, There have, it is true, been great men who have been invalids, but their work was done in spite of their ill-health, and, good as it was, it ‘vould have been better had they been well. Not only do men and ‘omen enjoy better health ; they live longer than they ever did before, and they have a much better chance of growing up. It spreads everywhere 5. Thirdly, our civilization is more secure than any that have gone before it. This is because it is much more widely spread. Most of the previous civilizations known to history came to an end because vigorous but uncivilized peoples broke in upon them and destroyed them. This was the fate of Babylon and Assyria ; it has happened over and over again in India and China ; it brought about the end of Greece and the fall of Rome. 6. Now, whatever the dangers which threaten our civilization, and they are many, it seems likely to escape this one. Previous civilizations, as [have said before, were specialised and limited; they were like an oasis in a surrounding desert of savagery. Sooner or later the desert closed in and the oasis was no more. But to-day it is the oasis which is spreading over the desert. Modern civilization is a far-flung thing, it spreads over Europe and America and parts of Asia and Africa. Practically no part of the world is untouched by it. And, owing to the powers of destruction with which science has amed it, it is exceedingly unlikely that such savages or uncivilized peoples as are left in the world could prevail against it. The world as one 7, Thus the world has now for the first time a chance of becoming asingle whole, a unity. So far as buying and selling and the exchan; of goods are concerned, it is a unity already. I did not menti ~ meals when I described my ordinary day ; if I had done so, I have taken note of the fact that the food I eat comes from all World. The things in a grocer’s shop, for instance, are fro1 ty Of the earth ; they come out of strange countries and ye Seas. There are oranges from Brazil, dates from A fri nea India, tea from China, sugar from Demerara. No crear’ Cali Easter king, not even Solomon in all his glory, could dra ae Tich stores of varied produce as the housewife who ——— 4 4 the grocer’s. The fact that these things come to us | her shopp ion my might ver the Scanned by CamScanner2 UNIVERSITY ENGLISH SELECTIONS the world means that for the first time the world is becominga Single place, instead of a lot of separate places shut off from one another, 8. Until quite recently the nations of ee ‘7 a number of separate boxes holding no communication wy each other except when the people in one box invaded those in the next, and some of the boxes were never opened at all. To-day there is constant coming and going between the boxes, SO much so that the sides of the boxes are breaking down, and the world is beginning to look more like one enormous box. And by now all the boxes have been opened, so that there is little danger of unknown people breaking in upon our civilizations from outside and destroying it. The danger comes rather from within ; it is a danger from among ourselves. This brings me to other defects. Defects of our civilization with certain exceptions, there is little political oppression; law and in many countries have a voice in deciding how and by whom they shall be governed. But the sharing. out of money—which means the sharing-out of food and clothing and houses and books and so on—is still very unfair. In England alone one half of all the money which is devided every year (called the national income) is received by one-seventeenth of the population ; which means that one half is divided among every sixteen people, and the seventeenth person gets the other half. So, while some few people live in luxury, many have not even enough to eat and drink and wear. Again, in England to-day thousands of people live in dreadful surroundings. There are many families of five or six persons who live in a single room ; in this room they sleep and dress and eat their meals ; in this same room they are born, and in this same room they die. And they live like this not for fun, but because they are too poor to afford another room. 10. It is, I think, clear that until everyone gets his proper share of necessary and delightful things, our civilization will be far from perfect. The danger of war 11. A still greater danger comes from war. Although the world is, so far as the buying and selling and exchanging of goods are concerned, a single whole, there are still barriers between nation and 9. Today, men are equal before the Scanned by CamScanner