the perfect gift

I love advertisements. I'm sitting on the orange line in Boston right now. The train is stalled, and I'm sitting here and perusing the advertisements. The one that really catches my attention, that made me whip out my MacBook (I know how to capitalize it because it's written right under my screen for cases like this) is an Odwalla ad. It pictures a dude sitting on a bike, with fruit for a face and a half a coconut for a head. Here's the kicker: the text reads "Drink Odwalla. Experience Full-Body Flavor". Lower, in smaller print, appear the words "The finest fruit, artfully blended."

I'll say artfully. We've gone so long as a society down the track of cheap witticisms that it truly is refreshing, just like the juice I so love, to see an ad that reminds me of an old cigarette ad: just a simple, straightforward, statement of value. You know, back from the days of black and white, when everyone must have been less intelligent because they moved in little jerky movements. You know, before advertising progressed to where it is now. You know.

Earlier on the platform I was staring at a quarter mile of matching Massachusetts lottery ads, about five feet by three and a half. Each was bordered with about six inches of forest green, and the background was white for each one. A stunning color combination, I must say, just about as gripping and sensual as a spider with leprosy. But I digress. These small panels alternated by type: the first type featured one of the twelve gifts of the twelve days of Christmas with a wise-ass crack about how bad a gift it was. Let's see if I can remember one: "Seven swans a swimming? Great, if your buddy has a LAGOON". Yeah. The other type was a dazzling array of foil-printed *gasp* lottery tickets with a sweet little script at the bottom saying "the perfect gift". Not even capitalized, as if the phrase were so obviously associated with this cornucopia of possibility that it required not even that simplest of decoration.

I started thinking on the lagoon comment. What, I thought, if someone reads that and does have a buddy with a lagoon? Doesn't that seem a little risky in terms of a widely-acceptable message? And what about the idea of dissing a popular Christmas carol anyway - was this really the way to attract customers? But then I remembered who the target audience was - it was those who (1) think the perfect gift is one that could not possibly offend, and (2) would react to a combination of lottery tickets cutely arranged and the most rank visual holidaeity by reinterpreting the exploding rolls of tickets at their local 7-11 as less trashy, and (3) would consider buying lottery tickets.

Why is it okay in this crowd to diss a beloved Christmas carol? Why is it not only okay, but likely to generate rapport and sell these shrinking poker chips?

To address this let me harken back to my days as a dusty country lad. Oh jesus. I'm kidding. But seriously, people where I come from buy a lot more lottery tickets than the people I surround myself with now. I won't get into any specifics, but the middle-aged and upward of the people that I know now happen to make more money than the middle-aged and upward of the people who live in the areas where I'm from. Given that basic datum, I'm going to spin a completely overblown tale of the differences between those with money (read: connections, education, influence, money) and those without money (read: connections, education, influence, money). For now let's call them the Haves and the Have-Nots, respectively.

Now that we have our groups pigeonholed for the sake of discussion, let's go back to our ad. (I believe I'm engaging right now in what's called being apologetic, and for that I'm sorry but bear with me). This ad is intended for those more likely to buy lottery tickets, the Have-Nots. Its primary intent is to make sales of these odd little devices which, in some manner I don't fully understand, can lead to one suddenly having enormous sums of money, moving to Vegas, and dying of a cocaine overdose. The Haves generally pass these shiny things up, because they tend to buy similar objects in round lots of a hundred or a thousand at a time, and when doing so find it worth their time to do a little math at the onset of negotiations to see how much money they can expect to return to them at the end of the day, and because the Haves prefer lidocaine which they get via their connections (read: connections, education, influence, money) for free.

Surely all human beings like shiny objects, though. So what's to ensure that the Haves don't start buying these things for the thrill? The Haves certainly purchase cigarettes, liquor, and fossile fuels for the thrill and these have even less chance of paying off than the shiny things. This scenario - rich people buying lottery tickets - is to be avoided, because at some point someone's going to spend their entire college savings on a roll of lottery tickets the size of a combine's wheel (also) and each and every one of the things is going to turn up nil. If it's a Have-Not, the story ends there because he'll be down to his last well-worn quarter. If it's a Have, he'll recoup the college savings in a few months and then use his allowance (read: connections, education, influence, money) to sue the lottery commission for all they've got (given that the lottery's holdings typically follow a cycle, depending on when exactly the judge orders payment, they may render payments in the perfect gift), something that would inevitably be allowed to succeed in order to spin a nice story about the little guy taking on the lottery.

Which is exactly what these ads are about. Everyone wants the lottery's money. The difference between the Haves and the Have-Nots, in this case, is how they're willing to get it. The Haves like to snuggle up to the system and work it to get their cut, bleeding the lottery one lawsuit at a time. They'll win because they'll pay their lawyers well, and they'll win again because their winnings will be more than their fees. The Have-Nots, on the other hand, like to be truly subversive. They like the idea of taking the lottery's money without doing any work at all, save whipping out their lucky quarter to uncover the tidings of their sudden fortunes. They like to go out there and seek the destiny that awaits them, to find it by ... repeated random sampling. Given Eliezer Yudkowsky's definition of intelligence as that which hits a target in less than chance time, what does this say about the Have-Nots?

While you're riddling that, I'll say what I meant to say all along. I guess in the end it's okay to diss Christmas carols when selling lottery tickets, because lottery tickets don't get bought by those who would be offended by such things. They get bought by those who think tradition means pain, who delight in vague hints of overthrow. For whom Christmas, each year since they were tiny children, meant a change of status.