Dear Monster: I've got a better idea

So, a few weeks ago I watched Boogie Nights on Netflix. It’s a great film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, set in the porn industry in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Pre-AIDS, just as the business was making the transition from film to video.

Burt Reynolds killed it, in his role as porn director Jack Horner  ― a self-proclaimed auteur with who deeply resents the rise of video and, with it, the (now-ubiquitous) ‘amateur’ genre of porn.

Reynolds perfectly, seriously, deadpans his way through Anderson’s nuanced and profoundly ironic script. Burt’s completely believable as a guy who completely believes he’s a fucking artist. The fact that he’s producing complete schlock utterly escapes him.

My appreciation for this film was enhanced by the fact that, back in the late '70s and early '80s, I sat through hundreds of hours of grindingly boring, terribly-written “story” while watching that shot-on-film porn in dingy theaters and video arcades where, if you dropped your wallet on the floor, you'd just leave it there and report your credit cards as stolen.

That influenced my evaluation of a video that showed up in my Facebook feed last month, called Dirt Shark The Doonies, sponsored by Monster Energy. While the title’s a play on Goonies, the video isn’t a riff on the horror genre. The trite dialogue (thankfully limited) and self-indulgent direction ― not to mention the scantily-clad chicks ― are all just bad porn, made worse by the fact that there’s no sex.

There’s lots of sexism, don’t get me wrong. It’s easily as sexist, if not more so, than real porn. 

A minute or so into this film one rider looks up and sees the female talent, wearing little more than sunscreen, and says, "Look at those girls. They look really thirsty." At this point, if you were just making a bad movie, instead of a bad porn movie, they'd ride to rescue. Instead ― and this shows real creative genius ― They do this...

It’s only 8 1/2 minutes long, but when I went back through it to pick out a couple of frame caps and gifs, watching it was enduring a rerun of Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’.

It’s so fucking terrible, as a video, that I don’t know whether I’m writing this to achieve some kind of catharsis, or to call out Monster Energy for producing (yet another) piece of trite sexist shit. 

I can totally hear someone at Monster whining, "But it wasn't sexist. There were chicks on bikes, too." Hey, AMA and MIC, check it out; women are riding more.

The motorcycle industry is desperate to trumpet any good news, when it comes to increasing the number of women riders. And the racing industry is hardly in a position to turn down sponsors, no matter how fucking tasteless they (or their products) are.

But I honestly wish they’d just go away. In fact, to encourage them I’ve got a suggestion for a cost-effective sponsorship opportunity that will reach a far larger audience than “Doonies” ever will...

Dear Monster: Has it occurred to you to sponsor actual porn? It’s way, way better than this, and the female talent is probably treated more respectfully.

I suppose I don’t blame the riders in this video. Most of them are not, probably, philosophy majors or noted ethicists. It was probably a pretty good day for them, and after all, Monster writes their checks. And this isn’t a diss on motorcycle racing per se, although I roll my eyes every time I see the Monster Energy “girls” at races, too.

There will be motorcycles in Super Bowl ads. There just won't be any ads for motorcycles, and that sucks

As the Super Bowl approaches, TV advertising becomes a topic of conversation because ordinary consumers recognize that it is the ad industry's "big game" too.

For years, Master Lock—a small company, compared to most Super Bowl advertisers—dared to blow their entire annual media budget on a single commercial in the game. It was always the same basic spot; a guy shoots a bullet clean through a Master padlock with a high-powered rifle, but the lock holds. That advertising strategy helped Master build a solid brand in that category, and it was proof that taking an expensive risk—because Super Bowl spots are very, very expensive—also delivered a big reward in terms of customer awareness and recall.



Every year, I bemoan the fact that no motorcycle manufacturer has the balls to run an ad in the big game—the kind of ad that would reach a wide audience with the goal of not just selling a bunch of bikes, but selling the very idea of motorcycling. Surely it's not that the sport of motorcycling doesn't lend itself to advertising. If you can make a great TV ad about a padlock, you sure as hell could make one about a motorcycle.

I've already written about Honda's famous 1964 "Nicest People" campaign. That campaign broke during the Academy Awards telecast, which was the most valuable ad time in the world, at that time. (The first Super Bowl was still three years in the future, and it would be some time before the NFL grew into the commercial behemoth it is now.)

Honda hired Grey Advertising—a top ad agency in the 1960s. One of the problems with motorcycle advertising today is that manufacturers have chosen to work with agencies which are not in advertising's big leagues. The one notable exception was Harley-Davidson, but even they dropped Carmichael-Lynch after years of excellent creative.

In 1964, Honda spent $300,000 on its Academy Award ad buy. Corrected for inflation, that's about $2,500,000 in today's money. So not quite in present-day Super Bowl ad territory—the nominal cost for a 30-second spot in Super Bowl XLIX is about four million bucks.

But look at it this way: $300,000 was the equivalent of Honda's gross revenues on 1,200 units of its best-selling motorcycle.

I don't know what American Honda's best seller is today, but whatever it is, I bet that if the company was willing to spend 1,200 times that revenue, it could afford a spot in Sunday's game. Obviously, the people running the company today are playing with deflated balls, compared to the guys calling Honda's plays in 1964.

Ironically, I also bet that more than one ad will feature a motorcycle cameo. All kinds of other brands include motorcycles in their spots these days, because they know motorcycles are hip and all-round awesome. Think about that: the guys making those other brands' ads are using valuable screen time to show you motorcycles they don't even sell, just to make whatever they are selling more appealing. Imagine how excited those Creative Directors, Copywriters, and Art Directors would be, if they were ever given the chance to advertise a motorcycle.

You know that cool ad agencies are full of hipsters who already commute to work on caféd-out CB350s and chopped Ruckuses. Or is the plural of Ruckus, 'Rucki'?

Irony #2: Loctite is advertising in this year's Super Bowl. Yes, Loctite. They sell those little tiny bottles of goo, that you put on your nuts, before screwing.

Sorry, that was a cheap shot, but I couldn't resist it. But seriously folks. Loctite dares to risk an obviosly huge chunk of its marketing budget, promoting a product—shit, a category—that most Super Bowl viewers don't even know exists.

You know who does know what Loctite is? Everyone who works in the motorcycle industry. I hope they're paying attention to Loctite's sales numbers and awareness over the next year.

So this is how it ends...

Too little, too late, Obama's staked some ground for 2012. Let's have an election decided by the question, "Should people making over a million dollars a year pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as people struggling paycheck-to-paycheck?"

The argument against the so-called 'Buffett Plan' will be that any increase in taxes paid by these multi-millionaires will reduce their investment and thus reduce their job creation. (Note they are multi-millionaires because the new rule would apply to people making over a million bucks a year, not people with a million bucks. That would be even better, but Obama won't dare go there, for reasons I'll get into in a paragraph or two.

Leave aside the fact that 75% of the U.S. economy is based on retail spending, and that a.) people making $1M+/year are already spending all they want, and b.) their marginal spending comes from buying Ferraris, not Fords, and Veuve Clicquot, not Two-Buck Chuck. So giving them more disposable income actually results in an economic boost for Italy and France, not us. And what? Are they going to invest it in the stock market?!? The market rewards companies that move jobs to Viet Nam, not companies that create jobs here. Then those investors blow their lightly taxed capital gains on Ferraris and Veuve Clicquot.

But none of that matters, because any argument about the net economic effect of such a tax is just a straw man.

The real issue here is that Americans have always been remarkably optimistic about their own economic futures. This has been true in fat times and lean; during the years leading into the baby boom, when the American Dream seemed like manifest destiny -- and things really were just getting better and better for most people -- most people thought they'd get even more better (if you can follow that tortured sentence.) And in the depths of the Depression, when things were getting worse and worse for most people, most people didn't think things were going to get quite as bad as they did. Yep, Americans have always been economic optimists -- or they've at least been insufficiently pessimistic in even the worst of times.

That means that a ridiculous percentage of the population entertains the fact that they themselves might someday be rich, and they vote accordingly. Remember Joe the Plumber? The moron who didn't want to raise taxes on people earning $250,000 or more a year because he thought that some day he might buy the plumbing company he worked for, and then he'd be saddled with those extra taxes? Obviously, he was just a dupe, part of a grand media setup by a cabal that stretched from Karl Rove to the Koch brothers, but the story angle that didn't get any traction was that people who were plumbing contractors -- people doing the job that Joe the Plumber aspired to -- were, like, He's going to make 250 grand doing this? He's on crack. The vast majority of plumbing contractors, including the guy who really did own the company Joe the Plumber dreamed of buying, told journalists that 250 grand was totally out of the question.

Rove's (and his ilk -- it's basically a cabal that's loosely organized but which is operating in shared self-interest -- I'll call them the Republicabal...) Where was I? Oh yeah, Rove's plan, all along, was to complete a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%. (People in the 90th-99th percentile for wealth and income weren't really scheduled to benefit from the Republicabal's plan, but 'trickle-down' economics does work in the sense that it trickles from the top 1% down to about the top 10%. So the wealthiest 10% of voters could be expected to support the Republicabal just by voting in their own interest.)

But obviously, 10% of the population can't swing U.S. elections on their own. To pull that off, the Republicabal had to first eviscerate America's public schools, to dumb the population down as much as possible. Then, they had to fragment chunks of the electorate who were committed single-issue voters -- gun rights activists, anti-abortion fundamentalists, people who hate crash helmets -- and pander to them. That gave them a pretty sizable minority to work with as a political base.

But it still wasn't enough to swing elections in many areas. Once they'd dumbed down the population, they could steep the Tea Party zealots in the idea that, despite the fact that the average American is paying a smaller percentage of his income in tax than at any time since WWII, it was taxes that were keeping the population down. (Not, for example, the way the wealthiest handful of industrialists had moved every middle-class American job offshore.)

They also worked hard to disenfranchise the poor. But even adding up all the rich people, plus all the people who aren't getting poorer, plus all the gun nuts and all the religious fundamentalists, and all the Tea Party kooks and half-wits, and taking many of the frustrated poor off the ledger could not quite swing most elections. So how did they succeed in getting more than half the population to vote their way?

The average family in the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population is now over 50 times as wealthy as the average family in the bottom 99%. That's a concentration of wealth that exceeds countries in Central America - or, say, Libya - where an army of secret police is (was) required to prevent a popular uprising. The Koch brothers are no more capable of withstanding a popular uprising than Kaddafi was, so what gives?

How they succeeded, and what gives, is this: the swing vote in every recent election was made of Americans who, in good times and bad, remain irrationally optimistic. (OK, in times as bad as these, let's call them insufficiently pessimistic.)  Yes, there are millions and millions of American voters who, in the face of all the evidence and against all of their direct personal experience find themselves thinking, But what if I get rich? Then, I'll want to keep all my money, just like these guys. It's the political equivalent of 'The Secret'.

The old idea of The American Dream is politically sacrosanct. There have been long stretches in American history, too, when it really seemed to apply. If you worked hard, and lived right, it was almost a certainty that your kids would do a little bit better, even, than you did. Now, that is a dream. But it's unlikely any Democratic candidate will dare to tell the American electorate the truth.

If they did, here's what it would sound like:

If you're in the bottom 90% of the population in terms of wealth, you have seen and will continue to see a drop in your purchasing power and wealth for the foreseeable future -- IE, for the rest of your life. If you're in the 90th-99th percentile on the wealth curve, you can expect to break even. If you're in the top 1%, you're going to get richer. If you're in the top 0.1%, you're going to get exponentially richer. Congratulations! You're one of the American Kaddafis (for now.)

If this sounds like a rabble-rousing rant, it isn't. The Republicabal's plan worked. They won. It's unlikely, at this point, that the U.S. could reverse the course they set, even with all the political will in the world. Rebuilding the educational system alone would bankrupt us. We'll have our hands full taking care of the tens of thousands of seriously injured war veterans who gave limbs, eyes, and faces to enrich Haliburton and stroke the ego of America's second-stupidest President (and who sacrificed themselves in a second, ill-considered and unstrategic war against opponents -- like the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- that at least presented us with targets worth punishing -- even though we essentially created or at least empowered the Taliban in previously ill-considered support of the Taliban's fight against the Russians. Help drive the Russians out of Afghastlystan? That was the worst idea ever. If the Russians had still been bogged down there at the turn of the millennium, 9/11 would have been perpetrated against Moscow, not New York. We should have let them punch each other out for decades. But that is rant, and one for another time...)

The future, for the vast majority of us, has nothing to do with improving our situation. That isn't going to happen. It has everything to do with finding ways to be satisfied with less. That will do us all some good.