Back when Mad Men was airing, and Sterling Cooper was making loads of money from the Lucky Strike account, I could feel something almost like nostalgia for the cigarette ads that in my youth were a constant presence on tv. I can still easily recall the taglines.
Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.
Pardon our grammar, but: Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.
I'd walk a mile for a Camel.
With the aid of Mad Men, I can picture the guy responsible for the best of them. High up in a cool skyscraper, he scrawls and scratches out successive false starts, eventually hits on something he likes, makes a few minor changes, and, finally, is ready to build a campaign around
Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro land.
I suppose it requires something like genius to hit upon "Marlboro land" as an irresistible evocation of American masculinity, but how many Marlboro men died on account of the success of this campaign? If you pay a hit man to kill one person, it's a serious crime. But if an advertising wiz kills thousands, he wins the industry's highest award--a Clio, or whatever it is. Once you decide to do the wrong thing, your talents are a bane to humanity. The darkest frontier of the phenomenon concerns the German word Todtentechnologie--death technology. When the Nazis were trying to achieve the Final Solution, they hit upon a lot of practical problems. It's not easy to kill that many people. For example, gas chambers are efficient, but you really cannot say to a hundred or even twenty people, "Now we're going to gas you to death. Please step this way." Once the Nazis had solved enough of these problems--devised a sufficient number of "process improvements" is the business school phrase for it--they got into working order a pretty efficient assembly line of killing.
Human beings working on "problems" that shouldn't be "solved" is so common that almost everyone is blind to it. Of course it helps that most people don't bring tenacious ingenuity to their dirty work, for we'd notice it more if they were sufficiently able to succeed now and again. In our country, we have the Republican party. What is it for? The rank-and-file call into talk radio shows to shout stupidities. The party's leaders may be distinguished from them mainly because members of Congress tend to dress well. Their incompetence, as evidenced by the recent health care debacle, is probably impossible to overstate. Dip in anywhere at random, the only thing that lands in your scoop is muck. Trump promised "something terrific," coverage for everyone at a fraction of the cost. But he had no idea at all what to do, so farmed out the task of writing a bill to the people who had been railing against Obamacare for seven years. Turns out, however, that they also had no idea what to do. The bill they hastily drafted would not have "covered everyone"; according to the CBO, 24 million people would have lost their insurance. That was too much even for them. They made some tweaks, and the CBO said the new bill would still cause 24 million people to lose insurance--but would cost more. That was the effect of their improving tweak! They made a few more tweaks and were going to vote on the third version Friday, before the CBO could score it, but then called it off when it was apparent they didn't have the votes to pass it. They probably learned they didn't have the votes from reporters, because I doubt these guys--and they are guys--can even count.
A Politico story, "Inside the GOP's Health Care Debacle," commences:
Donald Trump had heard enough about policy and process. It was Thursday afternoon and members of the House Freedom Caucus were peppering the president with wonkish concerns about the American Health Care Act—the language that would leave Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” in place, the community rating provision that limited what insurers could charge certain patients, and whether the next two steps of Speaker Paul Ryan’s master plan were even feasible—when Trump decided to cut them off.
"Forget about the little shit," Trump said, according to multiple sources in the room. "Let's focus on the big picture here."