King

Joe Biden Has To Be Better Than Super Bowl Commercials


Post 1,042

However odd it might be, we love our Super Bowl commercials as a form of entertainment. Millions tune in just for them, not so much for the football game. And with the cost for just 30 seconds of ad time at $7 million, the ad agencies and the companies they create ads for better make you want to buy their product.

So, here’s a test: Name all the brands or products you remember seeing in the 59 commercials you watched on February 11. I’m guessing you won’t remember many of them, so let’s try this another way.

There were roughly 101 celebrities in the ads. How many can you name and what is their connection to the product they hawked? (Answer: none)

Far more to the point, having seen the Super Bowl commercials and had your arm twisted by celebrities, are you likely to buy any of the advertised products? Betcha you’re not. And there is a point to this that goes well past your product buying habits and Super Bowl commercials.

While we might have been entertained by some of these ads (whether or not we could figure out what they were for), our behavior will be largely unchanged. The reason for that is the same as for poor political messages.

For a message to cause us to take action, it has to move us. We have to feel something that lights our fire or brings tears to our eyes. It doesn’t matter if there are celebrity endorsements unless the message speaks to us deeply.

So, here’s the deal for Joe Biden. He has to stop doing whatever it is he’s doing now and speak to us from his gut to ours. He has to make us feel why we should care.

We know that the other guy is entirely bad for our country and bad for us personally. We get it and it’s okay for Joe to tell us about that. But nobody wants to vote for Joe Biden only because he isn’t as bad as the other guy.

Joe, ya gotta make us want you bad. You have to reach into us and touch our hearts and our guts. Then your gaffs and your verbal and physical stumbles won’t matter to us and we’ll vote for you.

When the message digs into our innards we remember it and we just might be moved to give the product – Joe Biden – another try, as did the best Super Bowl ad ever, the 1984 Macintosh ad.

You clicked through to watch that Macintosh ad, didn’t you? If you hadn’t seen it already you were curious and if you saw it back then, you remember it because it did more than entertain you. it moved you. It shook your world and made you think differently about what is possible. Maybe it changed you. You were hungry to see whatever that Macintosh thing was going to be and how it was going to leave behind the boring stuff the big boys had and how it would make your world not just better, but really cool, too. That feels really good and motivates us to take action.

Click me – and then see point #5 below

Simon Sinek has a wonderful TED talk and a book called Start With Why. He points out that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t tell us that he had a plan. King told us, “I have a dream today” and we were grabbed down deep by that dream. We were captivated and motivated and had tears of passion in our eyes. His message was moving and memorable through the great magic of hope and that’s just what we need right now in order to restore our democracy, revive America and heal our deep, self-inflicted wounds.

Biden has a plan to do that, and nobody wants to hear about it.

In other words, Joe, you have to be what the Superbowl LVIII commercials were not: moving and memorable. Tell us about your dream for us, Joe.

What if the people running Biden’s campaign were that good? What if his messages truly spoke to us and were more powerful than the largely ineffective Super Bowl LVIII commercials? What if Joe Biden told us about his dream?

Super Bowl Ad Clunker

Boyhood pal Frank Levy reacted in a FaceBook post to the Jesus “He gets us” Superbowl ad:

“I always thought the point of Christianity and Christians was that they are supposed to get Jesus, not the other way around.“

He’s right.

Who’s Counting?

$5M + $83.5M + $453.5M .  .  .

and the interest meters keep on running.  Plus. the threat of prison time is looming.

Accountability: It’s a good thing.

Have I ever mentioned that I love it when a bully gets punched in the nose?

Finally

There was a campus shooting resulting in murders last week. I know someone living nearby the scene. That it was nearby makes our ongoing mass murders more than horrible. It makes them very personal.

I wasn’t having an empathy outage during the Kansas City and Atlanta and Fayetteville and Claxton and Baltimore and Bronx and Jackson and Huntington Park and Chicago and Birmingham and Carson and Montgomery and Burnsville and Middleton and Indianapolis mass shootings (those are just since Super Bowl Sunday). It’s just that this campus shooting, being close to home (as in: heart) brings it into stark reality for me. It’s funny how sometimes we don’t fully “get it” until it’s personal.

Well, I don’t need that up close and personal wake up call to feel the pain and awfulness of these murders. Nevertheless, these shootings do carry more voltage for most of us when they are personal. And every one of them is personal to real live people, like you, me, our families, our friends and our neighbors, whether across the street or across the country. Now two more are dead and more families wail and grieve.

See my post about this here.

  • Today is a good day to be the light
  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

DO SOMETHING! – Part 1


I was talking with my long time friend David Ellman the other day. Actually, we were venting our rage over 19 more kids and two more teachers being massacred. We were livid.

We, like most of the American people, are sick of the constant stream of innocent dead people, the hypocritical thoughts and prayers, the stupid non-solutions (only one school door and it’s locked all day, Sen. Cruz? Really?) and the intransigence of the suck up wing of the Republican Party (that’s roughly all of them). More on that coming in DO SOMETHING! – Part 2.

Anyway, Dave had an interesting solution – actually a few solutions – to help cops to intervene to stop murderers. You know: like, DO SOMETHING!

  1. Install small, inexpensive cameras in classrooms and hallways that can be streamed to dispatchers and cops so that the cops know where the bad guys are. That way they’re not breaching a door without knowing which way to shoot to stop the bad guys.
  2. Install peep holes between rooms. This solution has a couple of extra benefits, like being super cheap, plus cops can stop the threat without actually entering the room by shooting through the wall.
  3. Same idea as #2, but with schoolroom false ceilings.

He went on to say,

“I bet there are hundreds of retired men and women in every community who have mechanical skills (basic construction), and who would gladly donate some time to assist in the installation of peep holes, cameras, etc. in local classrooms. All it would take is one knowledgeable (and properly licensed) person to lead a team of workers. Labor would be donated by everyone. I’m sure that teams in every town could be created in days, not years.”

None of Dave’s ideas requires battling the NRA or its bought and paid for politicians. And yes, I agree that there will be privacy issues to contend with over cameras and peep holes, but Dave continued,

“In a country that allows an unhinged 18 year old boy to buy an AR-15 with a thousand bullets, and Donald Trump to have total control over a button that could initiate a nuclear war, I don’t think it’s a stretch that a school principal should be able to turn on a camera in a grade school classroom that has just been taken over by an armed shooter.”

The point is that there can be simple and inexpensive solutions that don’t get stymied by self-serving, disingenuous, mealy-mouth politicians. Of course, such measures won’t stop every attack, but they’ll stop or at least limit some. What if we can come up with additional simple and inexpensive solutions? Do you think that we just might gradually reduce the body counts in America? So do I.

The people of Uvalde and Buffalo have spoken, telling us what to do and they are right: DO SOMETHING! That’s what they told President Biden. That’s what they’re telling us: DO SOMETHING!

I haven’t faith that 10 Republican senators can be found who will vote for whatever compromised-to-near-nothingness bill is negotiated and presented to them. It comes down to us – you and I – to take whatever steps We The People can take right now. Later, as the magenta below makes clear, we’ll Fire the bastards!

Here’s the action summary of this One-Two DO SOMETHING!

One

This is going to take everybody’s hands on the rope to pull this wagon to get it to where we want it to be. You’ve heard Dave’s ideas. What creative ideas do you have? Scroll down and you’ll find the Comments section where you can contribute your ideas to stop or limit our ongoing national death march. My commitment is to compile a list and forward it to all members of Congress.

Two

What creative ideas do you have to get candidates elected who are bold enough to pass meaningful, sensible laws to protect our children and grannies and church goers and concert and movie attendees and .  .  .  wait .  .  .  that’s all of us.

Which candidates will you phone bank for? Will you send out election reminder post cards? How about kicking in a few bucks to a congressional candidate in a swing state? And you can do something to elect state legislature candidates who think my little granddaughter and other school kids shouldn’t have to do active shooter drills. Here’s a link to The States Project – these folks are all about that and you can make a difference that just might keep people from getting killed.

Remember: To Fire the bastards! (see below) we have to replace them with good guys. That’s about promoting the right people and voting. That’s on us.

The Onion provides context. Click the pic and watch the slide show.

All of our noodling over solutions that can do something about our national carnage is way less of a problem than our being perpetually livid – most of the country is livid right now. We’re livid over 19 little kids and 2 teachers, plus shopping grannies and church goers being killed and with 25 being injured, too, all in the space of just 10 days. And during those same 10 days there were 15 other mass shootings in America. Those tallied 11 more dead and 61 more injured and that count doesn’t include Tulsa. See for yourself here.

“It goes up to 11. That’a louder, i’nit?” From This Is Spinal Tap

The Uvalde and Buffalo survivors are right when they say, “DO SOMETHING!” We can’t count on Congress now, so it really is up to us. Crank up your creative ideas machine and set it to 11.

Many thanks to Dave for his ideas and for stimulating this post.

Must Reads

Yolanda Renee King is a 14-year-old granddaughter of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She has a message for her peers that you need to both read and then distribute to the teens and 20-somethings in your life. She has the spirit of her grandfather and we surely need that spirit right now. Many thanks to JN for pointing out this remarkable piece.

And read Allie Carter’s piece in the Washington Post, At school, we prepare to be shot at. This is how it feels.

Livid: A Question For Our Time

Where were the parents of that Uvalde shooter for the past 18 years?

Or the parents of the Buffalo shooter for the past 19 years?

For that matter, where were the parents of all of our Glock-, AR-15- & AK-47-armed, body-armored teenage mass murderers for all of their years?

WHERE THE HELL WERE THE PARENTS?

Every one of them raised a monster.

From President Biden:

Enough. It’s time for each of us to do our part. It’s time to act. Add your name to urge Congress to take action to end gun violence.

  • Finally, read this if you want to know why 18 – 23 year olds commit mass murders. Then, DO SOMETHING!

————————————

Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution: Fire the bastards!
.
The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Did someone forward this to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!)

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
  5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town vibrant.

JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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