AD VERBS 1: Pontiac’s got this new ad with a computer-animated version of the Munch Scream man. A red sports car appears on his bridge. He gets in and immediately morphs into a shades-clad “dood,” happily puttering down the road. By treating chronic depression and/ or realistic world-weariness as just a minor “attitude adjustment” problem, it ridicules the worldview of the young-adult generation it’s trying to sell to. How typical. Speaking of ill-advised selling points…
AD VERBS 2: I know I’m not the only one disturbed by the new Blockbuster Video slogan, “One World, One Word.” It harkens back to a line used in the ’80s by its now sister company MTV, “One World, One Music, One Channel.” Both phrases envision a singular corporate deity commanding the entire Earth’s population with a single brand of formula entertainment. It’s not just monopolistic, it’s monotheistic. And it’s not what either music or video ought to be. Rather, millennial pop culture is (or is becoming) a pantheon of sources, ideas, aesthetics, genres, sounds, and looks; something as vast and chaotic as the world itself. Speaking of dangerous delusions of hegemony…
ANGUISH LANGUISH: The whole Ebonics mania is about teaching the ability to communicate. The furor over it shows just how much miscommunication we have to deal with. From hate radio to the op-ed pages, Beemer conservatives and Volvo liberals alike are decrying something Ebonics isn’t, something that existed only in oversimplified newspaper descriptions. What the Oakland, CA schools want to do isn’t to “promote” the language spoken by Af-Ams in inner cities and the rural south. They want to treat that language in class as a legitimate idiom, with its own rules and norms–and then to use these notions of rules and norms to teach business English as a second language. Think of it as sorta like your Pygmalion/ My Fair Lady shtick, with modern school-bureaucrat propriety substituted for Prof. Henry Higgins’ old-time classism.
The more rabid critics of Ebonics are using it as an excuse to deride Black English as “gibberish,” and those who speak it as “illiterate thugs.” This kind of arrogance is part of the whole point of Oakland’s Ebonics scheme. It’s a scheme to teach kids to speak and write business English without telling ’em they’re idiots for not already knowing it. It’s a scheme combining Calif. new-age “empowerment” hype with legitimate linguistic studies. Indeed, as occasional Stranger contributer Zola Mumford can tell you, Black English is a fascinating mix of words and pronounciation patterns from Africa, the US south, and elsewhere. Everybody from beatniks and mall rappers to jazz and art lovers have benefitted from its traditions and continual innovations. (I wrote a couple years ago that “teen slang in advertising” could be defined as how old white people think young white people think young black people talk.) The catch is that most potential employers speak a different idiom, one which must be learned by potential employees. What might really frustrate both rightists and centrists is where Ebonics departs from the Higgins metaphor. It treats business, or “white,” English as a trade idiom (like the old-Northwest “Chinook Jargon” taught by white pioneers to conduct business with different native peoples who spoke different tongues). The idiom of CEOs (and of talk-show hosts and columnists) is treated as just another English variant, not as the language’s one and only proper form. Speaking of learning…
CRUNCHY NUMBERS: Tucked away in the residential enclave of Maple Leaf (89th & Roosevelt) is an educational-toy store with a wonderful name, Math’n’Stuff (looove that juxtaposition of specifics and generalities!). If you didn’t grow up in the kind of Harper’s-subscribin’, Pendleton-skirt-wearin’ family you see in all the Nordstrom Xmas ads, you can now fantasize about that sort of patrician cocooning with this store’s vast array of geometric puzzle games, algebra flash cards, mind-bender storty-problem books, and K’Nex building sticks. (They’ve even got genuine Rubik’s Cubes!) Much of the store’s merchandise is meant to teach kids to see math as relevant, by relating “real” world observations to the world of numbers. I imagine a different, equally-valuable use–to teach teen and adult computer nerds that the world of senses and physicality is just as exciting as the world of logical constructs.
