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| How often does a mostly-political blog find a legitimate excuse to display a photograph like this? And who am I to argue with such an opportunity? |
What is Victoria’s secret?
Alas, it’s that sex no longer sells.
Alas, it’s that sex no longer sells.
Yup. You read that right. According to somebody named John Livesay, scribbling in the trade magazine Target Marketing, Victoria’s Secret is in trouble because…
What happened to Victoria's Secret is the same thing that happened to Kodak and Blockbuster. They didn't keep up with the changing needs of their customers. Women today seek to buy from brands that make them feel empowered, not just sexy. Being strong in your resilience, beliefs, and overall health is what is sexy today. No longer do women want to just look good to get a man; they want to feel strong to feel sexy to themselves!
The author of this piece also quotes a retail marketing guru. The guru, who evidently speaks in tongues, offers the following advice for saving the bra and panties business:
“Victoria’s Secret needs to develop and focus on clear avatars (potential customer types), tell better stories, and unify the customer experience. A renewed sense of purpose is emergent by turning down opportunities and as a company making hard decisions.”
In plain English, allow me to offer some other advice: I’ll bet you six double-talking marketing consultants that women aren’t feeling sexy because, along with the rest of America, they and their lives have been repeatedly and royally screwed by Donald Trump.
When you’re worried about dying of COVID-19, or wondering if it’s safe for your kids to go to school, or terrified that you won’t make the rent because your employer just laid everybody off, it’s pretty hard to feel sexy — much less splurge precious dollars on some frilly underthings in the hope of turning on your equally beat-to-hell old man.
But if I were Victoria’s Secret I’d hang in there. Sooner or later, Trump is toast. And when that happens, and the COVID-19 Plague gets stamped out, and businesses reopen, and jobs come back, and schools get back to teaching children in safe classrooms, and the economy perks up, women will rise up and sing “Ding dong the witch is dead!” Shortly after that, Americans will once again begin acting like happy rabbits during rutting season.
Below, a short meditation on suicide by the late Dorothy Parker, whose brand of humor inevitably gets described with the adjective “acerbic.”
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful’
You might as well live.
Parker was a poet, humorist, journalist, book reviewer, essayist, screenwriter, and member of the once-famous Algonquin Round Table, a table located in a hotel restaurant across the street from the New Yorker magazine’s original offices. It was here that the likes of George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and Parker — along, occasionally, with Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber and other sharp minds of the day, raised formidable amounts of noisy hell, traded viciously funny barbs, ordered precious little (sometimes bringing in their own bag lunches), and drove the management to distraction Monday through Friday during lunch hour. But don’t weep for management. The denizens of the Round Table made the Algonquin Hotel famous.
Unfortunately, Parker’s death in 1967, if not acerbic was certainly lonely. Her three marriages had ended in divorce. She had no siblings with whom she was close, no children to whom she could leave her money. But she did have a social conscience, and willed the bulk of her estate to the Reverend Martin Luther King, or in the event of his death, to the N.A.A.C.P.
Human remains in
a law firm file drawer
Meanwhile, she was cremated, and for a long time her ashes suffered an acerbic fate, spending six years lying around in a crematory and then another fifteen in a law firm’s file drawer. It was Benjamin Hooks, then executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., who in 1988 learned of her unsettled ashes and planned a memorial garden for her behind the organization’s headquarters in Baltimore.
But now Hooks himself is ten years deceased, the N.A.A.C.P. is moving to Washington D.C., and Parker’s ashes have become an issue. Evidently, there are no plans to dig up Parker’s urn and take it down to D.C. with the organization. Some people are hoping to goad the civil rights organization into doing just that. But I prefer an alternate suggestion — that her ashes should be displayed in the Algonquin Hotel’s lobby. According to the New York Times, the hotel’s manager “declined to comment.”
If management of the hotel doesn’t offer to take and display the urn, management are idiots. Parker’s urn would be a visitor magnet. And that couldn’t hurt now that hotels, and hotel restaurants, are withering thanks to Donald Trump’s incompetently-managed pandemic.
While Hooks’ gesture was kindly and noble, the Algonquin, rather than a back yard in Baltimore, or even in the nation’s capital, is the logical place for Parker's ashes. She helped make the place. Moreover, her ashes would get more visitors in a week at the Algonquin than most of our own final resting places will get in an eternity.
While Hooks’ gesture was kindly and noble, the Algonquin, rather than a back yard in Baltimore, or even in the nation’s capital, is the logical place for Parker's ashes. She helped make the place. Moreover, her ashes would get more visitors in a week at the Algonquin than most of our own final resting places will get in an eternity.
Hey, Algonquin, go for it!
“Stop the presses! What's that?
You say they’ve already stopped?”
Simple rule: without a robust free press, you can’t have a robust free nation. Corruption and evil are scum that rise to the top of the pond. It's the free press that sniffs it out, points it out, roots out how it got there, and encourages people to get rid of it before it poisons everything in the water.
If there’s an explanation for why the human scum that is the Trump administration still lingers at the top, part of it is that our press is drowning. The villain is the Internet, which distracts from the news more than it contributes to real reporting, sucking the attention and the revenue out of what used to be your daily newspaper.
Strangle newspapers and the pond scum thrives. Weaken a newspaper, so that only a single part-time reporter can be paid to cover city hall, or the state house, or the cop house, not to mention Washington D.C., and before you know it venality and brutality begin to breed with each another. That's why you have the crook in the White House sending anonymous agents in fatigues to illegally kidnap and beat up peaceful protestors in Oregon. It’s never good news when newspapers are on life support.
Such is the case, although hardly a unique one, in the state of Wyoming. The state has 40 newspapers, but most of them are weeklies. The state also allegedly has some “dailies” — except they don’t come out every day. On Mondays, not a single newspaper is published in Wyoming. Now the Casper Star-Tribune has announced that it will no longer publish on Mondays and Tuesdays. Nieman Lab, the journalism organization, reports:
Of the state’s six dailies (“dailies”), the Star-Tribune was the last one still printing seven days a week. The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle in Cheyenne killed its Monday paper in 2018. The Laramie Boomerang (what a name) doesn’t print on Mondays or Tuesdays. The Riverton Ranger skips Mondays and Saturdays. The Gillette News-Record printed a Monday paper until two months ago, when it cut back from six days to two.All this its yet another indication that our nation is, at least for the moment, hopelessly shafted. And yes, you can consider this outlook acerbic.
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