David McElroy

Random recent thoughts that never led to longer pieces, sometimes because of time constraints:

I’m amused by the dishonest games that some companies and political causes play today related to Super Bowl ads. Here’s the new way to get attention. Make a cheap 30-second spot with a controversial message that you know the NFL will reject. (There are plenty of mainstream bidders for those ads, so the NFL doesn’t need to take a chance on causing controversy that it can avoid. Any savvy media buyer can explain this to you.)

Then submit the ad to the league and wait to be told that it’s not the sort of ad the NFL wants for the Super Bowl. After that, start yelling loudly about censorship and then get outraged people online to all share your banned” ad — an ad that nobody else would have watched otherwise. This way, tons of people see your ad and you’re not required to pay $4 million for an ad that you couldn’t afford anyway. Smart, huh? Yes, but very dishonest.

A gun company is doing it this year. PETA was doing it as far back as 2009. And others have been doing it since then. Some might see it as just being smart, but I see it as really dishonest, because the people who are complaining about being banned had no intention of spending $4 million to ran an ad. (Most of them almost certainly had no ability to spend that kind of money for 30 seconds of air time.)

Trying to write something that’s completely honest and true is difficult, because ego and “spin” try hard to get into the way. The more honest and true I can be with my words, the more simple and clean they feel to me. When my ego has an agenda, the words seem convoluted and slimy, even if they’re persuasive, like what you’d expect from a used car salesman. Writing anything that’s completely clean and honest is hard, but when it happens, it feels as though I’ve cleaned something on the inside. I wish I could feel more often that I’ve successfully done it.

I’ve recently realized that one of the biggest reasons I look forward to making a lot of money is that it will give me the ability to patronize the rare artists who I actually care about supporting in a semi-serious way. I don’t care about the trappings of wealth that matter to most people, but the idea of being able to underwrite the production of an album that would otherwise go unrecorded or a film that I want to see produced is a powerful incentive.

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Did you hear about the death at a New York City Walmart early Friday morning? Black Friday shoppers were so eager to get inside and start spending money that they broke through the store’s front doors and trampled an employee.

All over social media, this story and similar bits and pieces of anecdotes are being reported as the latest evidence of the depravity of our society. But I’ve been sitting here Friday afternoon wondering whether we’re all just looking for evidence to confirm what we already believe.

There’s an odd bias that causes what’s expected to be reported and talked about, especially if the anecdote confirms what we already believe. For instance, there are stories every year on Black Friday about how violent it is to be shopping today, especially at Walmart (since Walmart is the all-purpose boogeyman today). There’s always at least one story about a shopper being trampled to death. (It was an employee in the story today who was killed, but maybe a dead shopper will still turn up and save the narrative.)

But I’ve been to stores on Black Friday and never seen anything vaguely violent. My friends who are “serious shoppers” don’t seem to see this horrible violence. They might see angry people argue over who gets to buy the last giant television for a few hundred dollars off, maybe. They might have even heard frustrated people threaten each other over who gets to buy the last $9 crockpot.

But I’m pretty sure that more people were killed in their cars on the way to shop today than die in the stores. If you combined every Black Friday-related “shopping death” for decades and decades, it still wouldn’t be as many as were killed in car accidents before breakfast this morning.

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For some people, holidays evoke images of close, loving families straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. They love their families and cherish the memories of the past and love everything about seeing their families for Thanksgiving.

For others of us, spending time with families sounds like a terrible idea, because it makes us feel lousy and it brings up bad memories of the past. What’s more, family-oriented holidays can be times when there’s an unspoken conspiracy of silence to pretend that the rest of your family’s history never happened.

For those of us who see extended families that way, it’s more Norman Bates than Norman Rockwell.

Another family holiday coming around reminds me again of the fundamental split between these groups. For some people, it’s a wonderful time. For others — including me — it’s just a reminder of families who were more painful than loving.

What’s worse is that most of those who attach pain to family still go through the motions of pretending to be part of something loving and special. But the maudlin things that families say to each other on family-oriented holidays are rarely consistent with how they relate to one another for the rest of the year.

I can never decide whether this inconsistency is sad or funny. I guess it’s both. This is why so much of life is self-satirizing to me. If you had a Norman Rockwell family, that’s great. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the way others of us feel — because it seems to be considered impolite to admit that the other side of the coin exists.

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