THE UNKNOWN AD AGENCY

I am non-political, but I learned that the Rove-Bush-Cheney Advertising Agency was created in 1999 with an obscene budget – unlimited since they weren’t spending their money.  It was a budget every ad agency in America would kill for.  All those dollars allowed them to dominate radio, TV, newspapers and magazines. Their market:  The American People.

Of course, before presenting their numerous programs to Americans, they conducted focus group after focus group to see if their ideas would fly. We suspect that those respondents were first vetted for their political penchant much like attendees at their various political town halls. The groups gave them a heads up on their program - naturally.

Their messages, half-truths, filled with over promises, exaggerated in the extreme and blatantly false were heard, seen and read everywhere – literally inescapable. They bombarded Americans with a litany of campaigns to sell their concepts: 

• Conservative Compassion (meaningless failure)
• Weapons of mass destruction (another failure)
• War (an explosive failure)
• War on terror (big bomb)
• We fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here (logic lapse)
• Smaller government (a big failure)
• Controlled spending (an expensive failure)
• Education (an illiterate failure - most children left behind)
• Privatized Social Security program (colossal failure – rejected by most)
• Ownership society (the rich win, the poor lose)

And many, many others. RBC was a veritable factory of short-lived, destructive concepts. They forgot Lincoln’s wise words that you can fool some of the people some of the time etc, etc.

Like most ad campaigns, theirs were filled with braggadocio and hyperbole and each message was repeated, repeated, repeated– a major key to the success of every ad and commercial – a fact they understood too well. They were hardly amateurs and photo ops were their forte. My personal favorite was the staging of Bush’s head aligned with the Mt. Rushmore presidents. It was truly inspired. The fly-boy suit comes in second.

Having presented their agenda to one and all, they then deluged the American public with slogan after slogan again and again. A few are:

Bring ’Em on – Shades of the old West

Mission accomplished - Overstatement

Faith based initiative – God help us

Shock and awe – Overpowering and catastrophic

Intelligent design - Oxymoron

Clear skies – Polluted

Death tax – May it rest in peace

Freedom fries – Short-lived and embarrassing

Freedom toast – Burnt – and equally absurd

We will succeed – At what?  Wishful thinking.

We will stay the course – No matter the consequences

            

Some of them flew initially but they all eventually and justifiably crashed. The measure of a successful, thriving ad agency is its ability to sell their products or services not once but again and again. One-shot sales are a fiasco and that’s all they had.  Judging by this nationally accepted standard of repeat sales as a measure of success, the Rove-Bush-Cheney Advertising Agency ultimately folded its tent and closed up shop. We will not miss them. Please note: There really was no such ad agency.  But there could have been.

It should also be noted that the advertising community, in addition to bestowing awards for the best campaigns, also has an award for the biggest bomb. It’s the Holy Moley Award.

BANG

Why do liberals never shoot anyone?  For one thing, they don’t have guns so how can they possibly reload? Instead of shooting with guns, they shoot off their mouths. Frequently. And often loudly. Perhaps it’s because they think and evaluate which makes them elitists. Thinking bad, believing bullshit good.

Watching those conservatives at various bused-in meetings with one or more guns is terrifying. And they do shoot. People with whom they disagree, such as doctors who perform abortions. Killing them is OK but terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape, incest or simply because the women can’t afford a baby or simply don’t want one, to them is murder. To me, murdering a living human being is murder.

On my list of those deserving of a “bang” are psychotics like Glen Beck who, like so many people incarcerated in mental hospitals think they are God, Jesus or Napoleon and liars like the “entertainers” on Fox who spout their own peculiar fantasies including but not limited to the biggest mouth of all - Limbaugh, or the politicians who will tell any lie to be elected or those odd looking people sporting straw hats with tea bags dangling around their faces because they think they’re real Americans (Note:  those are the Indians) or those sanctimonious family values folks who screw their little hearts out with hookers and/or employees ad nauseum.

My fondest fantasy is that men become pregnant. In that event, we’d never hear a word from those holier-than-thou guys screaming against abortions. It would be a dead issue.

Liberals need to get realistic. They need to toughen up. And maybe just shoot.

THE OFFICE VISIT

"Hi Dr. James...”

“Good to see you Ms. Smith. How’re you feeling?”

“Couldn’t be better. But I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Shoot.”

“OK.  Do I need Prilosec?”

”Do you have acid reflux?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

“Viagra?”

“I don’t think you have erectile dysfunction now, do you?”

“No.”

“Levitra?”

“Ditto.”

“That’s funny.”

“Not really.”

“What about Plavix?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your heart, so no.”

“Zelmoron?”

“That’s for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, known as IBS, and for constipation. Are these problems for you?”

“My stomach is just fine.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Procrit?”

“Since you’re not on chemotherapy, I think not.”

“Lipitor?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your cholesterol.”

"Zyrtec?"

“I didn’t know you had any allergies. When did they start?”

“I don’t….they didn’t.”

“Then forget it.”

“How about Paxil?”

“Are you depressed?”

“No.”

“Lastly, Wellbutrin?”

“You still don’t look depressed to me. Are you” 

“No again.”

“Ms. Smith. What you need is your TV remote with the mute and off button. Use them and stop listening to all those commercials. They’re making my patients – and me – crazy. If these ads continue to run, I’ll need an anti-psychotic pill.”

THE EVIL NURSE

Ask any health professional if he or she ever wants to be hospitalized. To a person, the answer is no because they know what dangers lurk in those halls of healing.  Everything from staph infections, errors in medication, medication given to the wrong patients, operating on the wrong body part (remember the doctor who operated on the wrong side of a woman’s brain at a noted New York hospital?) or on the wrong patient. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to be hospitalized but we do it at our own risk regardless of the hospitals’ or the staffs’ credentials. 

Now I don’t want to upset you but the following experience is true and was avoidable. In 2001, I needed a left hip replacement; the right one had been done two years before and the result was perfect. So when I returned to the same hospital and the same orthopedist, I expected it to be a piece of cake. Not.

I had been advised by a friend who had had the procedure when I had the right one done that I should have private duty nurses round the clock because the nursing staff was so overworked you could wait hours for help and I wouldn’t be able to move out of bed without help. It was good advice for the first operation. However, for the second, it was a disaster.

When I checked into the hospital I booked round the clock nurses. The operation went fine – the physician is a first class orthopedic surgeon – and I was recuperating as expected.  Since I was a hip replacement veteran, I knew all about how to get my body out of the bed.  It‘s simple.  You slide the good leg slowly off the side of the bed and the nurse, holding the foot of the “new” leg, gently slides it off the bed.  Well, one of those nurses was either incompetent or sadistic. 

It was four days after the surgery at about eleven PM and I wanted to go to the bathroom. She started assisting me when she twisted my leg with such force, she yanked the prosthesis right out of the socket ripping the quadriceps and flexor muscles. I think my scream was heard round the world. I had never felt such pain.  The floor nurse came rushing into my room as I lay there screaming and she called the resident on duty.  The established protocol is that whenever there is the least suspicion of dislocation, the hip must be X-rayed.  But this resident chose not to follow the protocol and instead shot me full of morphine but did not even enter it in the drug log.  A major error.  In fact, one might call it malpractice.  I apparently awoke sometime during the night in severe pain and the nurse gave me another shot of morphine. That one was logged.

I awoke about seven in the morning very drugged and somehow remembered my daughter’s phone number which frankly surprised me since once I program a number into my phone, I delete it from my head. However, the mind is a wondrous thing and the number was retrieved. When she answered, I managed to tell her that something terrible had happened.

She called my son, they called my surgeon and all raced down to the hospital.  I was less than coherent and totally immobilized.  When my doctor arrived, he had an X-ray machine brought to my room and indeed the prosthesis was dislocated.  An anesthesiologist was summoned (he used an amazing drug, Versed, so I felt nothing but was able to carry on a conversation) and the doc tried to manually relocate the prosthesis.  I lay in the bed immobilized for the next twenty-four hours. 

The following morning he returned, asked me to move my toes, couldn’t do it, the X-ray machine was again summoned and again it showed the dislocation.  The doc tried to relocate it once more, another twenty-four hours of being drugged and immobilized and the next morning the toes still would not move.

“We’ll have to operate again,” he told me. When he did, he discovered that when the evil nurse yanked out the prosthesis, she ripped both the quadriceps and flexor muscles that couldn’t show on the X-Rays.  That was why the manual relocation wouldn’t work.  He relocated the prosthesis, sewed the muscles together and I spent another week courtesy of my medical insurance.

Was I angry about this?  You bet.  I found a medical malpractice attorney and sued both the nurse and the hospital, both of which will remain nameless since that was a condition of the settlement. I attended the depositions of both the evil nurse and the incompetent resident and controlled myself as I listened to them lie throughout the interrogation by my attorney. The nurse said that I never screamed but winced.  The resident denied giving me morphine and since there was no paper trail to prove that he did, my word was not good enough.  Obviously I survived but spent over two years taking physical therapy.

My favorite fantasy is running into that nurse, knocking her down and yanking her leg out of its socket. Do you think I’m vindictive?  You bet.

ADS…ADS…ADS…

In truth, we can applaud advertisers for bringing so many health problems to the public’s attention.  In fact, did you know that before World War I, most people never brushed their teeth until the toothpaste manufacturers began advertising in newspapers and magazines? Now, of course, one can spend an hour in the toothpaste/mouth wash aisle trying to decide which one to buy. That shouldn’t be a most important dilemma. 

In our era of managed care, whether it’s indemnity insurers, HMOs, Medicare or Medicaid, as a result of the TV advertising blitz, consumers are becoming more aware and responsible for their health.  By communicating various problems that people may be oblivious to, hopefully the health of our citizens will improve.

But. You knew there was a but. Several years ago the first prescription drug company ran a TV campaign.  If you recall, it was for the purple pill. The commercial never gave its name or what it helped cure.  That didn’t stop people from calling their docs asking for it.  I asked my internist if his patients were actually calling him for a prescription for this mystery product. His answer was yes.  They didn’t know if they needed it or why. Amazing, no? Year two, the company gave away the secret. Its name: Nexium. Its purpose:  acid indigestion/reflux. And it became a huge success.

But let’s not discuss just the drug companies and their entry into mass consumer communications. It was inevitable that TV was also discovered by attorneys, CPAs, stockbrokers, diet doctors and plastic surgeons.  The attorneys touted law suits.  The CPAs lowered taxes and/or money management.  Diet doctors hit the overweight issue incessantly. You know the stockbroker story.  And plastic surgeons offered eternal youth. It has obviously worked because they continue their TV campaigns.  That’s the measure of success.

Cable has been far more lenient for these advertisers than the major stations and TV stations are rife with commercials for professionals who years ago would never have dreamed of advertising (the thinking was it was unprofessional and that may be right) but it proved that it worked. In spades.

Now, with consumers able to access literally hundreds of stations and with the wonders of the remote (my favorite hi-tech toy) that so conveniently zaps commercials, it is becoming harder and harder to catch the attention of viewers and advertisers are furiously testing other venues for their ads. Nothing as mundane as matchbook covers.  The arrival of the Internet provided a fertile area for those annoying pop-ups. Tops of cabs and inside cabs try to sell us something or other.  Heaven forbid a sanctuary in a cab. And various hitherto unthought-of locations are under investigation as of this writing.  The day will come when advertising will truly be inescapable unless we flee to a deserted island (becoming rarer and rarer) or Mars becomes habitable.