The Last True Burger and the Biggest Threat Against America
We all know the world we live in is a dangerous place, rife with conflict, violence, suffering… well, let’s face it, it’s just a flat-out, full-blown mess.
I mean, we’ve got this un-winnable war in Iraq; we’ve got the threat of an imminent terrorist attack; we’ve got the looming disaster of climate change brought on by global warming; we’ve got the threat of nuclear proliferation; we’ve got genocide in Africa; we’ve got an epidemic of obesity; we’ve got a culture that admires the wrong people for the wrong reasons; we’ve got a huge trade deficit with China and Japan and an even huger federal budget deficit. We’ve got a social security system that is sure to go bankrupt and a Congress that is just as sure not to have the guts to fix it. We’ve got an immigration problem, a health insurance problem, a homeless problem, a drug problem, a race problem, and a crime problem. We pay trillions for oil from people who hate us. And we have two political parties who hate each other even more.
Not a pretty picture, huh?
Yet, as bad as all this is, there’s one aspect of American life that I think is even more threatening to our survival, and, in fact, has been a major contributor to, and in some cases even creates, all the problems I’ve listed above.
I bet you’re scratching your head trying to figure out just what in the world could be any worse than all the stuff I’ve set forth. Well, think about it a little, and I might just come to you. But if not…here it is, the biggest problem of all:
HYPE!
That’s right. HYPE. Short for hyperbole. Hyperbolic statements. Absurd exaggeration. Spin. Inflated rhetoric. Bloated prose. Grandiose overstatement. Excessive strings of superlatives. Magical thinking. The compulsive, excessive use of adjectives and adverbs to inflate and distort even the simplest declarative sentence.
The definition of HYPE: The use of imprecise, emotionally charged words to make things seem better, or worse, than they really are.
HYPE’s purpose is to make the bland, the boring, the mediocre, the poorly done, the distasteful, the cheap, the ugly, the unpopular not only seem not so bad, but also by directly and repeatedly telling us so, to give us a positive feeling about the person or thing or idea it’s promoting. HYPE’smission is to make us think what it wants us to think.
HYPE strives to distort our thinking, skew our judgment, and make us conform.
HYPE operates on the premise that perception determines reality. Change people’s perception and their reality is sure to follow. Simple as that.
BIG TIME HYPE was first invented in the around 1950 on Madison Avenue in New York, the dark heart of the advertising industry, by some smart guys who understood that certain words, carefully selected and incessantly repeated, could sell a lot of stuff that people previously didn’t know they wanted or needed.
Now HYPE has spread, like an infectious disease, to every aspect of our culture: HYPE sells movies and movie stars, sports and sports stars, TV and TV stars.
HYPE creates politicians, wars, heroes, and HYPE sometimes creates the news itself. In fact, a lot of news is nothing but re-packaged HYPE.
HYPE creates Brands. Brands are what give corporations their identity and value, so corporations love HYPE. They pay for most of it, though government, politicians, and religion are big players in the HYPE game, too.
HYPE works by exploiting basic human psychology: DESIRE, HOPE, LAZINESS, ENVY, GLUTTONY, FEAR, GREED, and especially, the need to be liked. More or less the “Seven Deadly Sins,” updated for our times.
Television and now the Internet have made HYPE the wild force that it is today. It’s cheap and easy to blast millions of people in one single moment with a huge dose of HYPE.
How do you know you’re getting HYPED? (It’s sort of like getting “slimed” if you know what I mean.)
Here’s some of the words that are a dead giveaway that HYPE is happening:
“Excellent.” This is my all-time favorite hype-word. I once knew a guy who, when you asked him how he was, as people often do as a form of greeting, would always say “excellent.” It never failed. Well, this guy was never “excellent” on his best day. He was pretty much stuck in an upward struggle toward average, and I’m being generous here. But like I said,HYPE knows that if you create the perception, surely the reality will follow. So if he said he was “excellent,” then it must be true! Most people believed him. They admired him for his self-hyped state of excellence. “Mr. Excellent,” as I came to call him, figured out HYPE’S secret: It works!
“Delicious.” And all its food-related siblings like “tasty” and “hearty” and especially “mouth-watering” (as if a watering mouth is an appealing image). I can’t even talk about this without getting nauseous.
“Brilliant.” If you read the New York Times on a regular basis you’ll begin to think that almost everyone who writes a book or directs a movie or acts in a movie is brilliant, if not a full-blown genius.
“Great.” Not a great word. It means almost nothing. Besides, it’s kind of “old school” now, having been replaced by “awesome.”
“Luminescent.” This is really big with people who write about actors. It has something to do with “glowing.” Do actors glow? No. They act. Light bulbs glow. “Radiant” and “transcendent” are common follow-ups, just in case you missed the point the first time around.
“Extraordinary.” This always means ordinary. Especially the person who wrote it. These people tend to follow up with healthy dose of “astonishings” and “unbelievables” just in case “extraordinary” was too subtle.“Stunning.” When was the last time you were stunned? When I was in Little League I got hit in the head by a pitch. That was the last time for me. And I can’t ever remember being “dazzled,” maybe because I don’t know exactly what that is, or feels like.
“Beautiful.” This is the laziest word in the English language. Whenever someone uses it, in writing or in speech, be assured you’re dealing with a slug.
“Breathtaking.” As in “gagging?”
“Fantastic.” HYPE-meisters who use this word have the arrogance to assume that all our fantasies are the same. I think not!
“Evil, Immoral, Brazen, Demonic, Damned.” Doom-and-gloomers often hype up their rants with such apocalyptic epithets. Negative HYPE is really hot these days, especially in religion and politics.
So I implore you, my friends, please switch on your HYPEdetectors. Once you get tuned in to what the HYPE-MONGERS are up to, you’ll see it for what it is — a transparent and sophomoric attempt to control your thinking. You’ll laugh it off or get mad at it, but you’ll also be building your HYPE-immunity so you can protect yourself from all futureHYPE attacks, that is from thinking something or doing something that you don’t really want to think or do!
About a hundred years ago when I was one notch above welfare, I earned a few bucks writing ads for an ad agency. One of the clients was a burger joint. They made simple hamburgers. That’s what the owner told me.
I asked him what made his burgers different.
Nothing, the owner said. We make hamburgers. Plain hamburgers. Greasy meat. A bun. Mustard (this was Texas). Mayo and ketchup for the Yankees. Cheese for 25 cents extra. Nothing Fancy. They’re good. That’s why people like them.
I had an idea. The anti-hype ad campaign. It was called “The Last True Burger.” I thought it was clever. Real. Honest. “Evocative.” (Sorry, I just couldn’t keep myself from using a least one hype-word.) I envisioned sexy young women (models, of course) eschewing style for simplicity, purity and reality, dripping grease and all, as they shoved the big fat burgers into their tiny little mouths. I put it all together, the whole concept. Soup to nuts. It was, well, “brilliant,” or so my internalized, private HYPE persuaded me.
But when I presented it to my boss, the “creative director,” of the ad agency, he said, “Are you crazy? There’s nothing here. No pizzazz. No excitement. Hell, they could do this themselves…why pay us? It’s got to be a great hamburger. It’s got to be delicious. It’s got to make your mouth water. You’ve got to tell them what to think. You’ve got to make the fat slobs want to drop everything and drive there right now and buy the damn burger because you’ve teased and titillated them into a raging fit of hunger so overwhelming that they have no choice to but go there and satiate it. Do you think “The Last True Burger” does that? This isn’t the title of a novel. It’s an ad campaign. Son, do you ever watch television?”
Thus ended my brief career in advertising.
And so I learned, the hard way, that all the adjectives and adverbs and superlatives—the blood and guts of HYPE — are designed to manipulate, not illuminate, and we should keep reminding ourselves that HYPE has nothing whatsoever to do with the truths we discover through our own hard-earned experience and contemplation, and also should have nothing to do with whatever choices we are compelled to make.