In his book “War Is A Racket”, the wonderfully-named Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler described his service of 33 years in the military as being just “a muscle-man for Big Business, Wall Street and the bankers”.
Coming from America’s most decorated serviceman, this was pretty heavy artillery fire and not exactly great recruitment copy.
I mean, here you are, freshly enlisted, crisply uniformed and ready to defend freedom, democracy, apple pie and the right to buy large-caliber machine guns at Walmart’s, and some highly-decorated general comes in and spits in your pineapple pizza.
Personally, I don’t mind the idea of being a muscle-man for Big Business, Wall Street or the brothers Kalamazov – well, as long as they pay handsomely, that is, and without asking me to risk life and limb in the process.
I am not particularly keen on war, you see (nor is our region’s industry, it seems, even when it is happening next door, but let’s not get into this).
Big business, big dollars: that’s basically our fare in advertising and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Unless, of course, the aforementioned Big Business and co start trying to convince us that it is all in the name of their own equivalent of apple pie.
Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the objective of our business was to sell stock, empty shelves, change consumption habits and generally stick a turbo on the wheels of industry.
Turns out I was wrong. Because if we were to follow the path set by our equivalent of the most decorated servicemen, our job would be to restore democracy, end world hunger, achieve equality for most of the letters of the alphabet, filter plastic out of the entire Pacific while simultaneously preventing child marriage, and ultimately put an end to wars (unless of course they happen in our vicinity but, again, let’s not get into this).
Yes, you guessed it. It is late June and I am talking of a certain festival and, soon, it will be just a distant memory.
A very distant memory, in fact. So distant that you’d be forgiven for forgetting the majority of its winners. So distant you’ll forget its purpose in the first place.
That’s because our industry has become so dizzy with its lofty ambitions that it has, itself, forgotten its own raison d’etre. Indeed, it has become so intoxicated with apple pie that it has forgotten its staple diet.
You see, if you are in a sales war and you think you’re in War On Want, an anti-poverty charity, then you’re not just fighting the wrong fight: you’re on the wrong front altogether.
By Ramsey Naja
