On Tuesday I deplored the pseudery of the latest marketing slogan for the Orange mobile phone company. "The future is no longer Orange," I wrote. "It's no longer bright. It's trite." This was the slogan that assailed my pseud-sense:
I am who I am because of everyone.
Reader Paul commented:
I agree: this new series of Orange ads are totally vomit-making with their bogus sincerity and ultra-nice characters.
Like the Boots the Chemists' ads of a few years back: (paraphrastically) You are marvelous, you're unique - your heart beats 70 times a minute every minute of your life and pumps 10,000 litres of blood every 24 hours. Your lungs expand and contract 26,000 times a day. Your kidneys filter 180 litres of water every day...&c &c. And that is why we are here - so that you can stay marvellous and unique - Boots supply everything that keeps you marvellous and unique. We care.
And don't get me started on L'Oreal, with their natural liposomes that "reduce the appearance of" wrinkles. Why? "Because you're worth it." And isn't Andie MacDowell the most irritating woman alive? For the "Andie" alone, she deserves to be locked up, preferably sharing a cell with a "Toni" or two.
In this week's Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple takes up the curmudgeon's cudgel, in a column that begins: "I think I should abandon the world: I am too easily irritated by it."
I come across an advertisement for a telephone company that funds a literary prize. It features the most recent prize-winner, ending with a slogan that makes the death of Little Nell seem like a detached clinical report. ‘I am who I am because of everyone’, it says.
This suggests such grandiosity and self-congratulation masquerading as humility that I feel as though I am wallowing in treacle laced with nitric acid.
Read the whole column. Dalrymple's dander is up and his displeasure is our pleasure.
Dalrymplian grumpiness is a goal I aspire to, and have not yet attained. I suspect a world without irritations would irritate him. It would irritate me, and perhaps Paul, too. We should be obliged to be cheery - a chilling thought.
