There are allegedly three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. I respectfully disagree. I think there are only two: lies to duck responsibility and lies to get you to buy things. I call the latter “blies.”
Tiger Woods, Anthony Weiner or Daniel Wu told lies to duck the fact that they behaved like idiots and couldn't keep their pants buttoned. Blies are different. They have no morality or ethical component at all. They don't have punitive consequences, since for the most part, they're perfectly legal and, in some cases, specifically protected by the U.S. Supreme Court in the name of free speech. All they want you to do is part with your money.
Of course, blies aren't what they used to be. The old Snake Oil, that could cure everything from hives to tuberculosis isn't around any more, even though a relative, Hadacol, stuck around into the 1950's. This particular snake oil, containing about twelve percent alcohol, was popular in dry sections of the United States, where it was often sold by the shot glass. Appropriately, the majority of money spent on the product was for – you guessed it – advertising. We should also not forget Ronald Reagan's favorite product (besides Borax), the ever-popular Chesterfield cigarettes, for which he was a spokesman at the same time we were hearing the blies for Hadacol. Reagan didn't smoke – he just advertised.
Today, thanks to an active effort on the part of regulators to stop this kind of thing, we find blies getting much more subtle. I recently saw a couple that made my head swim. There was the series from Exxon showing a school teacher, for instance, and an Exxon representative presenting views (with more time for the Exxonite, of course, with each commercial ending with, “We agree.” Well, gee! That's nice. Let's see what they might agree on.
Well, Exxon said it makes “relatively little money” on gasoline despite current oil prices and maybe that's true for the teacher, too. But did the teacher make eleven billion dollars in profit last year, thanks in part to tax breaks that allow it to pay a whopping nine percent on capital investment? I'm sure the teacher didn't “buy back shares and pay bonuses instead of investing in job-creating industries like renewable energy," as Exxon was accused of doing by Sen Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
And then there's Chevron. Their version of a blie is a commercial beginning “We have more in common than you think.” Really? I didn't have the highest income year in my working career while not paying a nickel to my government. And getting sued by Ecuador for screwing up a portion of the Amazon basin or dumping 40,000 gallons of crap into the Yellowstone River or destroying a chunk of the Alaska coast for quite a while doesn't remind me of anything we have in common. So what else?
And speaking of taxes, we don't have much in common there, either. The President proposed reductions in tax breaks for oil companies that would save the taxpayers 45 billion dollars over the next ten years, but that went nowhere. Instead, we're being asked to “sacrifice” by giving up portions of our Social Security and Medicare. What about having things in common?
Bear in mind that these blies were just the ones I heard in one evening of public television. I don't even want to think about what kind of garbage they're spewing on commercial TV.
We live in a nation of blies. They're the foundation of our economy and the basis of what we're told is the American Dream.
Dream on.
Dream on.
