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When
I sit here thinking over my many years
as a worker with words, one of the most surprising things to me is that it is not the many pages-long investigative
pieces that stick in my mind so much as
the throw-away sidebars that foundered at the editorial stage – by which I
mean, pieces that were rejected for publication for various idiotic reasons.
I remember, for example, many years
ago covering a luncheon speech given by a salesman --- perhaps I should call
him a sales expert --- who analysed the perfect sales pitch for the delectation
of his business audience. He expressed himself in terms that, to me,
constituted a revolutionary recasting of the purposes of the English language. Moving smoothly through the initial need for
a salesman to make contact with his victim ---
sorry, proposed customer --- our man (let’s call him George, that’s a matey sort of
name), recalled the salesman’s initial need
to outline what he called “the needs creation” area of his sales call. In other
words, he had to set out to persuade his interlocutor that he needed something that until that
moment he had never known he needed.
This, I guess, is the golden rule of all advertising, and it is probably
why many serious dissenting analysts of our current economic status quo
nominate advertising as the first thing to go in their proposed creation of a
better- ordered economy. But call me naive, I had never heard it expressed in
such stark terms before.
From that peak moment, George, putting
two and two together, moved seamlessly into what he called the “needs satisfaction area” of the call,
namely that part of his spiel in which he could persuade his victim that, his
hitherto unknown need having been created, the means for its satisfaction lay
at hand, right there in the speaker’s suitcase.
There were many other refinements in this
amazing address, items that have escaped my mind with the intervening years,
but I hastened back to the office to write an amusing, and to my mind irresistibly
informative piece, about the thought processes of the door-to-door salesman, so
brutally expressed in words such as I had never heard before.. I was perfectly
confident that my piece would receive a warm welcome from the editorial
poobahs.
In a pig’s eye with that. The piece
made its way to the desk of the Editor-in-chief who chuckled over it, spiked it firmly, then took the trouble to
call me in and inform me that this was not the sort of thing that any newspaper
that depended on advertising should think for one moment of printing.
Ah, well, wot the hell, as I tend to
say nowadays.
A similar fate met a piece I wrote,
only a few days after I returned from my eight years of relative freedom as the
correspondent in London, where I could write almost anything that came to mind
(within reason, of course, as all reporters know, although many of them seem to
think, mistakenly, that they are free actors).
I was asked to cover the opening of a super-market in one of Montreal’s
northern suburbs. Unaccustomed to the grandiose aspirations of Canadian
mercantilism after my years in well-mannered London, I waxed eloquent over the
new structure’s cathedral-like dimensions, marvelled at the amount of money
devoted to its construction, and commented that this was exactly what Fidel
Castro only a few days before had meant when he talked about the mindless
extravagance of North American capitalism.
This time there was no warm chuckle
of amusement when the Big Poobah lifted my piece from his desk and let it fall
as if it were utterly worthless. “This,” he said, “….this….we cannot be seen to
be critical of the very people who provide us with our income. That would be an
act of extremely bad taste.” It wasn’t very long thereafter that he began to
find things for me to write about elsewhere, in Alaska, where they were
building oil wells, or northern Alberta,
wandering the native communities, anywhere except at home, where it
seemed I might be expected to come up
with an embarrassing piece at any time.
I can’t exactly say what is the
connection, but all these reminiscences were brought on by my recent
astonishment at hearing so many politicians and commentators straining themselves
to the limit to make rational argument for the impulsive and implausible
actions of their new President, who is
so intent on making America great again.
I even heard one enthusiast outline how the president had already proven
the commentariat wrong by taking actions which have resulted in higher black
employment figures than America has ever
before experienced. That Latin Americans should be worshipping at his feet because
his enforced reduction of illegal immigrants has solidified the labour market
for authentic legal, Latin workers, who are already beginning their elevation
into the middle-class. (I have no idea
where he came up with these figures, mind you.)
I even read a piece somewhere by
Yanis Varoufakis, the failed wunderkind finance minister of the Greek
government, who analysed Trump’s onslaught on the global economic order as a
matter of the highest significance, and presented it as if Trump, the greatest
stumblebum ever elected in North America,
had thought it all out as if he were some professor of economics.
This brought me back to something I mentioned
in my recent piece about the bumbling
Doug Ford, now in charge of Ontario’s economy and well-being, which is that if
some half-baked leader comes up with a lunatic idea, there is never any
shortage of people who will get right behind him, and propagate his loony ideas
as if they were handed down from heaven.
I guess the connection mentioned heretofore is that these leaders who have been
foisted upon us by the rigged electoral system, are nothing but door-to-door
salesmen, peddling their wares to the ultimate disadvantage of a gullible public.
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