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Friday, January 31, 2003 |
it's all right if you hate that way, hate me 'cause I'm different, hate me 'cause I"m gay
A hopeful, sad, anger-making article in the NY Times on gay-straight alliance clubs. Hopeful, because when I was growing up there could never have been such a thing; sad because it's not common even now, and anger-making as soon as you start reading the quotes from the usual clique of hate-mongers who wrap themselves in the cloak of religion.Particularly distressing is this exchange between a school superintendent Bill O'Reilly, one of the most successful hate-mongers in America:
"I would have turned them down," Mr. O'Reilly said, "because I say once you open the door to a club based on sexuality, then you got to have the S&M club, the bigamy club, you know any club." Dr. Capehart said, "That's exactly my point." Mr. O'Reilly blamed the A.C.L.U. for the whole mess. "I call them a fascist organization," he said, "because what they're doing is using terror to further their agenda. Am I right?" Dr. Capehart added, "You are exactly right."
Ironically, there is a prominent segment of the American conservative movement that feels that Bill O'Reilly is "too soft"; try a Google search on "Bill O'Reilly" and "homosexuality" for examples.
Tolerance and Hypocrisy on Gay-Straight Clubs [NY Times: free registration required]
and now for something completely different
Looked at Jeffrey Zeldman's site, after a long time away, and found a feature called the Ad Graveyard, where he's archived varoius ads that were rejected by clients. I am particularly amused by a rejected ad for Scandinavian Airlines: "In Sweden, Gay Partnership is Legal. Even our King is Married to a Queen": Kind of reminds me of an ad I heard about from my friend in Dublin, who used to live in Holland. When she moved there, the local police department was running a recruiting campaign featuring billboards of the "salt and pepper" Andy Renko/Bobby Hill team from Hill Street Blues, with the caption "We have our Renkos. Where are our Bobby Hills?".
Warning: Zeldman didn't pick ads that were rejected for blandness; there's a very fine line between "edgy" and "offensive" which many people will find crossed by one or more of these ads, depending on what offends you.
think you're something special, well we'll make you just the same
The promise of the computer age is that we'll have the technology to finally recognize that we are all unique, to offer more than the blandness of the "nuclear family" that rules American planning when I was growing up in the 1960s. The threat is that the technology will be used to enforce still more uniformity, in pursuit of some misplace ideal of economic rationality. Borders has hopped on the "category management" bandwagon, where retailers rely on a supplier to choose what they stock in a category. Random House, for example, will be taking the lead in choosing what kids books Borders carries.
Welcome to the world of "category management," a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation's biggest retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves. You'd expect HarperCollins to tell Borders which of its own books are hot, of course. But that's not what's going on here. Borders has essentially tapped Harper to advise it on what cookbooks to carry from all other publishers as well.
I already have trouble telling retailers apart - Shopko, Target, K-Mart, WalMart - they all seem to have the same stuff at the same time. Now I know why.
"Rather than build strategies for this thing called 'books,'" he says, "we have to meet customer needs within more finite segments."
This is probably why you should not hire a former grocery store CEO to run a book business; Borders' CEO Greg Josefowicz used to the the head of Jewel-Osco, where he also introduced category management. The Mifflin Street CoOp has had a mural on their building for years that warned "Control of our food is control of the life within us", to which one might add that control of our books is control of the thoughts we can think. Who's Minding the Store?
