Many of my religiously devout friends & acquaintances are readers of HalfJoking, and they email dissenting comments from time to time when they believe my incorrigibly unreligious or irreligious ways warrant the time of day. And for that, I am truly humbled.

Not one of them has ever mindlessly bounced back with “unsubscribe” in the subject field because I disagreed with something he or she believed, even though my irreverence might gnaw at his or her existential core.

However, a considerable number of my friends & acquaintances of the liberal persuasion have let me know—after I’ve had the audacity to criticize the present Administration—that they don’t want HalfJoking sullying their inboxes ever again.

Hence, we live in a world where it’s okay to criticize God, but not Obama.

Anyway, the willingness of my religious and agnostic friends to talk with me (and among themselves) about the nature of their god…your god…any god…makes for interesting ontological speculation.

And so, I received an email from one of my Jewish friends, Howard, who wrote:

“If we are fortunate, there may be occasions when we are given just a glimpse to confirm that there is more to life than we know. Call it fate, divine intervention, karma, or destiny—use any word you wish, there just may be a God. Michael Jackson, acquitted by a jury, has, like a Hebrew National hot dog, answered to a higher authority.”

Hmmmm. I’ve always thought that if there were a just and merciful god, he would pull the plug on Michael Jackson not in the spirit of discipline or retribution… but as an act of mercy.

Clearly, Jacko’s life was one was so physically, financially, and emotionally out of control that the pain of its existence must have outweighed any of the benefit. Look up “emotionally tortured” in Webster’s and the entry should list: See “King of Pop.”

Here was a man who was uncomfortable in his own skin—literally. His face was almost falling off his head. He was either latently or manifestly pedophilic, as well as gender confused. He lived his life surrounded by leeches posing as sycophants, and sycophants posing as physicians.

This could not be that much fun.

As an erstwhile psychologist who worked mostly with kids, I used to look at photos of Jackson, read stories, and speculate to myself, “Where would I start? How could I ever help him? Would his check bounce, anyway?”

I think this whenever I see emerging child pop stars. I remember when Brittanney Spears was still small-time and performing in shopping malls around the country, being pushed & managed by her mother, and thinking to myself: That’s a train wreck waiting to happen.

(I look at Mylie Cyrus and worry about the same thing.)

It’s not that I’m so clever or prescient. Instead, consider that the road to stable psychological development—to developing a healthy sense of one’s own self—is a deeply personal journey.

The existentialists spoke to this with their dictum: essence precedes existence. Carl Rogers spoke of becoming. But maybe a clearer term comes from marketing: developing one’s personal brand. (Update: per my friend, Eric, I have this reversed: It’s existence precedes essence, of course.)

Each of us has a personal brand, which we’ve developed over time interacting with our environments. From childhood to adolescence, we learn what we like, what we don’t like, what we’re good at, what we’re bad at… and other’s learn these things about us, too.

That’s how we “discover” who we are… and how others “discover” who we are. And the extent to which these two perceptions jive with a common reality is directly proportional to our psychological well-being. Dare I say: to being comfortable in one’s own skin.

Contrarily, what must it be like to have others develop your personal brand… to have your handlers telling your public (and maybe you, too) what you like and what you don’t like…what you’re good at, what you’re bad at?

What must it be like to turn on the television and see yourself being interviewed by someone, listening as if you were a disinterested third party to see how you answered?

What must it be like to have a reality that only exists through the eyes of others? What must it be like to have no internalized way to know who are your friends and who are your enemies because each looks like the other to you?

What must it be like to be so estranged from yourself that you keep changing your own body to make it uniquely your own?

I think I’d kill myself. Or wait for God to do it.

The FDA earlier this month told consumers to stop using certain Zicam cold & allergy products because they can cause permanent loss of smell—which could be an added benefit if you lived in Gary, Indiana—but that’s not the point.

The point is that the makers, Matrixx Initiatives Inc., beg to differ, saying that Zicam products are safe and don’t cause loss of smell, which is exactly what you’d expect the makers to say, unless they were clinically self-destructive.

So whom do you believe?

The pedestrian answer, of course, is to believe the FDA, who are, after all, a disinterested party simply looking out for you and me, with no agenda of their own, a veritable roundtable of pharmaceutical paladins protecting our olfactory well being. Except…

As all government bureaucracies, the FDA has a vested interest in justifying its own existence… not to mention that it’s peopled with ideologues who have their own scientific axes to grind, reputations to hone, and political ambitions to nurture.

Consider: The  Zicam action is one of several high-profile moves under new FDA Commissioner Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg and her principal deputy, Joshua Sharfstein.

Zicam is low-hanging fruit for anyone hell-bent to show that he or she is doing something. The products have been targets of hundreds of lawsuits by consumers alleging that their sense of smell was damaged.

The active ingredient for Zicam is zinc, which has been associated with olfactory disorder as far back as the early 1930s, when it was tried as polio treatment. You would think the FDA would have noticed by now.

This inevitably leads us to the question: If the egregious olfactory side effects of intranasal zinc have been known for almost the last 80 years, how come the FDA is only now coming forward to protect the public? What we have here is a crass case of opportunistic grandstanding, gross incompetence, or historical malfeasance. Hell, maybe all three.

But that’s not to say any of us should snort the stuff.

William Hemelt, Matrixx acting president and chief operating officer, said in an interview: “This isn’t a new issue for us. We’ve certainly studied it for many years, and we think our products are safe.”

Well, maybe…but Zicam products represent fully 40 percent of his company’s $112 million in sales for the last fiscal year, which, if my calculator serves me correctly, would be $44.8 million. That’s nothing to sniff at, as it were.

Even if Matrixx management were the most selfless folks in the world—and I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet that they fall a little short—they are not a disinterested party to the debate.

It’s like asking Mark Sanford whether marital infidelity should preclude one from presidential aspirations: The situational propensity for psychological denial and rationalization is too salient to dismiss, which returns us to the question: So whom do you believe?

Don’t ask me.

But were we to conjure a world without an FDA, there would be private laboratories that would assay products for their safety, much as Underwriter Laboratories does nowadays for electrical appliances and other whatnots that harbor the potential to kill you, maim you, or flambé the premises.

These private laboratories would be remunerated by both interested and disinterested parties. Their credibility with the public and the medical profession would rest solely on their reputations for objectivity. And they would compete. An approval by a lab known for rigor would bear more weight than from one suspect of relative largess.

Would there be opportunities for corruption, incompetence, and malfeasance? Sure. Just as there is now with the FDA, whose examiners are sometimes found to be on pharma  payrolls, who are painfully slow to approve drugs, who sometime take 80 years to notice that a drug smells while you don’t.

But there would be more than just a single universal one-size-fits-all regulatory agency that’s supposed to be prescient about all foods and all drugs and all their attendant nutritional values and potential side effects. Some labs would specialize in cancer drugs. Some in nephrology. Others in endocrine studies. Should one fail in its mission, there would be another there to take up the slack.

Americans would start paying closer attention to what entity said their drugs were safe, and whether or not that entity is worthy of their trust. They might even check data from alternative entities that didn’t approve the drug, and then make their own balanced personal decision about whether the cure is worth the side effect.

How weird would that be?

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Last week a newly graduated college student burst into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and shot a 47-year-old mother of three in front of the Tom Petty exhibit. The shooter later explained to authorities that Baby Boomers all deserve to die because, as his college commencement speaker said, they have left a legacy that’s “self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish.”

Okay… that hasn’t happened, yet, although you might have heard that something similar happened at the National Holocaust Museum earlier this month, and the ad hominem logic evinced by the shooter, you can be sure, is exactly the same at its core. Hatred is hatred, and defining any particular societal happenstance upon an entire group of individuals, based solely on their membership therein, is what holocausts are all about.

You can look it up.

It makes about as much sense to scapegoat an entire “generation” for This Economy, “climate change,” and the currently ubiquitous Bad Karma as it would be to credit them for Microsoft, i-Pods, Wii, HDTV, and The Simpsons…which is to make no sense at all. Individuals invented each, and assigning credit (or culpability) based on their arbitrary “membership” in this generation, that religion, this nationality, or that race is purely evil, and can beget only more of the same.

Take your pick: Jews are cheap. Mexicans are lazy. Italians are crooked. Irish are drunks. Blacks are stupid. New Yorkers are rude. Any politician from Illinois must be corrupt. Gen Y’s are self-centered. Gen X’s are implausibly angst-ridden. These are all arguments ad hominem…crudely anti-intellectual…a shorthand for stupidity…an excuse for intolerance, violence, the pogrom, ethnic cleansing, skinheads, whatever.

Consider:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, 55, told Grinnell College graduates in Iowa that his was “the grasshopper generation, eating through just about everything like hungry locusts.” This isn’t only a deeply flawed entomological metaphor, neither does it refer to anything tangible that can be assayed by human logic. It’s like saying Jews are locusts. We all know what we’re talking about don’t we…wink wink?

Sen. Michael Bennet, 44, told seniors at Colorado College that the national “creed” of one generation standing on the shoulders of the next was at risk “because our generation has not been faithful enough to our grandparents’ example” and that “We have limited the potential of future generations by burdening them with our poor choices and our unwillingness to make tough ones.”

Whaddaya mean we, Tonto? What kind of crap is that? Can you deconstruct this for me?

Here we have one vagary (Baby Boomers) being compared to something even more vague (Our Grandparents Generation) as a way of indicting an entire demographic for the ex post facto offense of “limiting the potential of future generations,” which sounds like the sort of “grave crime” that Kim Jong might cook up. Such bullshit should get you kicked out of Sociology 101…not a commencement gig at State U.

What is predictable is that both these guys can be compartmentalized as Baby Boomers themselves. Thus, they evince a sort of self-loathing that’s been in vogue among the soi-disant intelligentsia since Dostoevsky declared himself sick, spiteful, unattractive, and possibly sclerotic.

I guess you have to aspire to something. But don’t include me.

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Last Wednesday’s post about the features & benefits of fathers for kids—and especially for boys—predictably instigated some readers to impugn my qualifications to comment on the matter because I myself have no children.

I faced this challenge many times during my erstwhile career as a psychologist, and I had to stifle myself from offering the sardonic observation that Susan and I had put a lot more thought into not having children than most people put into having them.

But that would have been mean… and just look at my face…do I look mean?

Instead, I used to offer the metaphor that one’s physician needn’t experience appendicitis himself to effectively remove your kidney. Of course, this allegory made absolutely no sense… but hell… this was psychology.

In truth, I used to work with the pre- to high school population during those days, and would teach coursework at the local Moo U at night. Thus, I would sometimes begin my day with three-year olds and end it at night with college kids. (Professors: write your own joke.)

Thereby, I lived a life daily immersed in the problems and travails of little kids, children, tweens, teens, and young adults. They seemed to like me. I liked them. I believe this gave me a breadth of understanding marginally adequate to always blame their mothers.

No, no, no. Just kidding.

Anyway, deciding that the world needs one or more somebodies who look & act a lot like you is the ultimate ego trip, especially if you believe that it’s encumbering upon your neighbors to feed, clothe, and educate them in any part. 

One might think it takes a village. But just how often can the village be taken?

In contrast, if you have libertarian proclivities, then parenthood is a luxurious and expensive undertaking, as you don’t think others have a duty to pay for it. This is a minority position, I know.

Thus, Susan and I decided to eschew the opportunity to biologically replicate ourselves. It was an easy decision to make.

First, we took inventory of our physical features and couldn’t come up with a statistically probable combination with which we would want to saddle another human being. My eyes, her nose, my complexion, and her physique would be the modest goal.

Doing the math, assuming a two-tailed probability for each of four features, the chances for either the least- or most-desirable combination were respectively a little better than six percent. (.5 x .5 x .5 x .5 = .0625)

This means the chances are 6/100 for a cute kid; 6/100 for one that looks tragically like me, and an 88 percent chance for what is euphemistically called “a less than ideal outcome” in medical circles.

We didn’t like the odds.

Of course there was the whole issue of intelligence. Not to be immodest, although Susan and I might not be the brightest crayons in the box, we’re definitely among the pastels. We have test scores to prove this, and both of us can spell “Massachusetts,” especially if the word processor has an integral spell checker.

Nonetheless, there’s the issue of regression to the mean. Consider baseball:

Mix two people who bat .300, and the odds are overwhelming that the new little slugger will have an average closer to .250. So the notion that our Bundle of Joy could compensate with intelligence for what he or she lacked in corporal attributes was quixotic at best.

Of course, many people are appalled that we would put this much cold-blooded analysis into not having a child. And as alluded above, we’re commensurately appalled at how little thought people put into popping out a kid until they find themselves in a minivan instead of their Bitchin’ Camaro and wondering how it all happened.

But it’s probably best for the species. Evolution should be left to those who have a taste for it. And besides, childlessness is a difficult value to pass on to the next generation.

Happy Fathers Day, again.

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Father’s Day means nothing to me because my own dad did the totally rude and self-centered thing of dying three years ago.  More pertinently, I myself have never fathered a child, so far as I know, and if I’m wrong about this my name is Bob and I’ve never heard of Stephen Barone who, by the way, is destitute and wants to borrow money from you.

But I am a big fan of fathers—especially for sons—because dads have built-in bullshit detectors that mother’s seem to lack. As an erstwhile psychologist, I’ve listened to sons tell their mothers all sorts of crap, and mothers give it careful consideration, analysis, and counter-argument. Conversely, dads smack the kid up the side of the head and say, “Don’t bullshit me.”

I would get boys alone in a room with their mothers, and said boys would spin yarns that required parameters of incredulity cosmically incompatible with a finite Universe. On the other hand, get the same boy in the same room alone with his father, and the conversation is much better aligned with veracity. When “Sean” starts bullshitting, the dad’s head would begin to rotate on its y-axis, projecting green vomit: Daddy isn’t here anymore, Sean!

As a therapist, I would appreciate this gentle display of paternal support. (For anyone who thinks this made me unsuited to the trade…I’m in total agreement.)

Of course, dads are crucial for both sexes. Have you ever compared & contrasted the way a father pushes his toddler in a stroller down the street, versus a mother? Generally the ride is way too fast and way too bumpy. The kid is hanging on for dear life…giggling. And when the dad is through, he feels compelled to toss the kid up in the air a few times to play catch with himself.

Such antics are important to gross motor development and kinesthetic awareness, fostering a kid’s confidence about his or her “position in space,” which is what physical competence is all about. Also notice: when a toddler falls down, a mother will typically give the child lots of attention, hugs, and kisses. Thereby the little rug-rat learns that he’s loved; it builds his sense of security; and “validates his needs,” which are all really important stuff, but it also reinforces whining.

Dads provide the solution for this conundrum. Thus, when a toddler falls down, a father will continue checking his PDA for ball scores. This teaches the kid that a skinned knee is not the end of the world, especially if daddy has money on the Yankees, and that being a victim is not a surefire way to get attention, especially from another guy.

In terms of cultural evolution, there are reasons why dads do these things: it teaches kids…in a word… to be unafraid.

Men teach boys to be in control of their immediate environments—or at least pretend to be so. It’s a guy thing. It’s not so much that dads are trying to fool their loved-ones so much as they’re trying to convince themselves that they can take care of them. This is why dads loathe asking directions. It’s not so much admitting the loss of orientation as it’s realizing the loss of control.

Telling a dad in front of his kids that it’s time to ask directions is the male equivalence of “I think your breasts are beginning to sag a bit.” The empirical quality of either statement might be impeccable, but we nonetheless shouldn’t expect a rational and even-tempered response.

Anyway, Happy Fathers Day to all. Especially if you’re a mom.

The Wall Street Journal ran a feature last weekend wherein Paul Starobin, if not outright giddy, spoke very enthusiastically about—are you ready for this?—breaking up the United States into smaller regional republics.

You have to admit: the idea has appeal.

As Starobin alludes, something upon which many liberals and conservatives agree is that Washington—that metonymic euphemism for the federal bureaucracy—is a grunting, stinking, rampaging pig that’s devouring states’ rights with untamed abandon.

As a corollary, libertarians fuss about the concomitant decrease in individual rights. But everybody knows that libertarians are as crazy as loons; and individual rights can’t be important because Leno and Letterman never talk about them.

Nonetheless…

The vision of a heterogeneous polity rising up and telling the local federalis to go screw themselves—along with the horses they rode into town on—is just too intoxicating, regardless of your political predilections.

Stage left, Vermont is one of the country’s most liberal states and boasts one of the most vituperative secessionist movements, its denizens especially pissed off about Washington’s hawkish foreign policies. Can’t say I blame them.

Stage right, there’s considerable secessionist sentiment in Texas: the only state once its own country—however so ephemerally—and they don’t call themselves “The Lone Star State” because they want to get along and play nice with Nancy Pelosi. (And they’re well armed.)

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, local politicos from San Diego County, Imperial County, and Northern Baja, Mexico are daydreaming about a new republic called “Cali Baja.” How cute is that? Sounds like a mixed drink with a little umbrella.

More ominously, there’s a religious group calling themselves Christian Exodus who are hell-bent to transform South Carolina into a Christian State. What that means, I don’t know, but you might want to dump the timeshare at Myrtle Beach. (Think: Margaret Atwood)

On the East Coast there’s something called Middlebury Institute, which advocates re‑purposing New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia into something called “Novacadia.”

Talk about the answer to a question that nobody asked: It would have Denmark as its role model. (Go figure.)

Meanwhile, in the Upper Midwest, there’s a group called North Star Republic whose mission is to establish “a socialist republic” in what today consists of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

I shudder to think what country might be their role model. Cuba? North Korea? I mean, let’s face it, the moniker “socialist republic” has really bad brand equity.

The first thing socialist republics do, once established, is build walls around themselves to keep the population from fleeing their workers’ paradise. (Maybe it’s the second thing. First off, they kill their political opponents. It’s the only thing they’re really efficient at.)

The thought of being trapped in a socialist republic that includes Minnesota is scary. Imagine being lined up and forced to listen to Garrison Keillor daily, that salient elitist masquerading as a rustic everyman. I would sooner poke out my eardrums with an ice pick.

Actually, I think the secessionists have the right idea, but reversed.

Instead of seceding from the country, they should instead advocate building a wall around DC. And a moat. Make that two moats… with alligators.  

Better yet, send Congress to Gitmo accompanied by the Executive Branch.

That would add a new sense of urgency to the whole waterboarding debate, no?

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America’s public sector is awash in so-called “stimulus money” and is well on the road to dwarfing the private sector, the latter who must fund the government largess and—let’s be honest—will be compelled to do so at the point of a gun, should they care to demur.

Is this socialism? Don’t you dare ask, unless you want to be called hopelessly ingenuous.

It’s now sort of a reverse shibboleth to use the word “socialism” to describe something that—or someone who—advocates the redistribution of wealth in pursuit of larger societal goals, which is precisely to what the word “socialism” pertains.

In effect, the left has co-opted the political lexicon, so that calling something “socialistic” when it’s precisely that garners you lots of tongue clucking and eye-rolling—as if you thought fluoride-in-the-drinking-water were a Communist plot.

This wouldn’t be so infuriating if it were done as a rhetorical sleight-of-hand. But usually, the people who do this are as dumb as bag of hair—and not as utile. They have no idea why they sneer when you call Obama’s nostrums “socialism.” It’s just what they do.

Go ahead: Ask one of them what they would call a broad set of economic theories advocating state or collective ownership of the means of production & distribution of goods. You might as well ask Beyonce what she thinks of String Theory.

Generally, innovation and wealth-generation come from the private sector (Think: Apple and Microsoft). Neither comes from the public sector (Think: Post Office and Department of Motor Vehicles).

Private sector size (relative to the public) is directly proportional to a country’s standard of living. Don’t believe me? Go to Italy. You can’t help but be impressed by the amount of people who work for government. And they tend to be very surly—molto scortese.

Stand on a corner in Rome on a cold drizzly day. See all those people going to work on scooters? They’re not doing it because they want to be cool. They’re doing it because they can’t afford a friggin’ car—or the benzina to put in it.

At the moment we have a government that is borrowing, printing, and spending money at rates without historical precedent—and so much so that it induced German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 2nd to chastise the American Fed for its unprecedented recklessness.

Angela might have caught Bernard Bernanke’s attention.

Two days later, he warned Congress and the White House that the U.S. economy will suffer if they don’t move soon to rein in the federal budget deficit—which he blamed for pushing long-term interest rates higher, as well as the specter of inflation.

And yes, this would be the same Bernard Bernanke who was a staunch supporter earlier this year of the Obama administrations $787 BILLION stimulus plan.

It’s as if he woke up June 4th with a crapulous  monetary hangover after a fiscal bender. However, don’t get your hopes up. Government types never opt for abstinence. Their solution is most often “the hair of the dog that bit them.” Each failure of their interventions is evidence of the need for more of the same.

It’s job security for them. But not us.

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Malls, those bourgeoisie shopping meccas that are impugned often and vituperatively by soi-disant social critics, are on the endangered species list, victims of This Economy, not to mention That Economy, and probably The Next Economy, too. Consider:

 

• Analysts estimate that the number of malls debilitated by anemic sales and high vacancy rates (so called “dead malls”) will exceed more than 100 by the end of this year.
• U.S. malls collectively posted a 6.5 percent decline in tenants’ same-store sales in the 12 months ended March 31.
• General Growth Properties, which owns more than 200 U.S. malls, filed for bankruptcy protection April 16th.
• Only one new mall has opened since 2006.

In case you’ve forgotten why you’re supposed to hate malls: along with fostering consumerism and aspirations toward a lifestyle that Al Gore exemplifies but doesn’t approve of for the great unwashed masses (that would be us), it’s because malls allegedly draw customers away from downtowns.

 

I’m not a retail expert. But it has always been my impression that malls are in the suburbs because that’s where their customers are—not the other way around.  No developer ever decided to build a mall in the middle of a cornfield in the hope that someone would build a suburb around it.

 

Cities are always blaming their misfortunes on suburbs and suburbanites. My family was living in New York City in 1966 when my dad looked around one day and decided he was raising us in a shithole.  A very expensive shithole, to be sure. But a shithole nonetheless.

 

So he moved us to bucolic Suffolk County on Long Island. His idea was neither new nor original.

 

By the end of 1967, Suffolk County had its millionth inhabitant. New York City was disgorging residents due to high crime, high taxes, dangerous schools, and poor public services. The Yankees weren’t doing so well, either.

 

The suburbs didn’t attract people so much as New York repelled them.

 

All of us displaced New Yorkers needed a place to shop for clothes and stuff. Malls started popping up, going west to east, following the diaspora: Green Acres Mall, Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall, Huntington Mall, Babylon Mall…it was 1969 before my neighborhood had one reasonably close by… Smith Haven Mall.

 

We rejoiced. And consumed.

 

In the Midwest where I currently reside, malls are held responsible for an epidemic of “historic downtowns,” which is code for an abandoned inner-city J.C. Penney building “re-purposed” into an antique consignment emporium, juxtaposed by abandoned storefronts, and smelling badly of potpourri.

 

Of course, Midwestern cities and towns have repulsed their populations for all the same reasons that Gotham did and does—just on a smaller scale. You only have to stroll through downtown Dubuque once to notice that the quality of life would probably be better anywhere out of town. The place is depressing. And ugly.

 

Yet, social critics still blame malls for the fate of downtowns. But maybe that’s about to change. And for two reasons:

 

First, the intelligentsia, self-styled or otherwise, is beginning to appreciate the role that shopping malls play in their communities, now that said malls are about to go the way of 8-track players.

 

Per the Wall Street Journal, “For towns and cities that are home to dying malls, the fallout can be devastating. Malls hire hundreds of workers and are significant contributors to the local tax base. In suburbs and small towns, malls often are the only major public spaces and the safest venues for teenagers to shop, hang out, and seek part-time work. Commonly, ‘the mall will be a meeting place, or, in some cases, like a city center,’ says Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte LLP.”

 

Second, the demise of malls is in part attributable to the rise of Big Box stores, which tend to eschew malls in favor of free-standing buildings surrounded by open-air shopping centers, some with tiny parks and outdoor cafes dispersed among fashion stores.

 

It’s Wal-Mart’s fault!  And Home Depot, too. First they destroyed our inner cities. Now they’re destroying our outer malls. Could government stimulus money for local malls be the next big thing?  Should we tax Wal-Mart and Home Depot to pay for the stimulation? 

 

It’s too irresistible, even if it’s not that funny. 

 

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In the world of marketing —and particularly automobile marketing—it’s all about brand image, which would be the intangible sum of a product’s attributes such as its history, reputation, the way it’s advertised, and most importantly: the emotions it evokes in the prospective customer.

In less technical terms, if a guy’s heart goes pitter-patter at the sight of a Toyota Prius, you can be pretty sure he’ll be limp dick when he sees a BMW m5.

Toyota knows this. BMW knows this. And they manage their brand images accordingly.

Nowadays when you see the GM logo, it evokes visions of a giant Rube Goldberg contraption designed to funnel money discreetly from taxpayers to the UAW to the Democrat Party. It doesn’t evoke images of automobiles so much as it induces nausea.

One of the great ironies of GM’s bankruptcy is the fact that GM practically invented brand image, and honed it into High Art during the middle of the last century. Each division’s identity was carefully crafted and differentiated.

Chevrolet was your first new car—the entry model—for when you were “starting a family,” as people were wont to say back then.

The next time you needed new wheels, GM calculated that you would be older and more flush with cash, so there was a shiny new car waiting for you at the local Pontiac emporium.

From there, you “graduated” to an Oldsmobile. And after that, a Buick, which was the quintessential “Doctors Car.” And finally, proof that you had “arrived” was a Cadillac.

(And yeah, I have “Once In A Lifetime” by The Talking Heads running through my head, too. But let’s stay on topic, okay?)

Each GM division had its own demographic, so advertising could be highly targeted. And not only were customers urged to “graduate” across divisions—each division had its own “good/better/best” trim levels within.

For example, Chevy had the basic Biscayne, the intermediate Bel Air, and the upscale Impala. Similarly, Pontiac had the Catalina, the Executive, and the Bonneville. And there were even further gradations.

Talk about aspirational marketing: only the 12 apostles had a better offer.

This was more than marketing genius. It was reflective of our Mid-Century zeitgeist: an implicit optimism about the future, about America, about the world. Things would always get better. People would always get richer. Cars would get bigger and fancier.

No wonder that what was good for GM was good for the country.

But then Americans became interested in “compact” cars and GM began to lose its way. Not because GM couldn’t build good compact cars—they certainly did—but because they focused on sales and forgot about marketing.

To sell as many cars as possible, the low-price Chevy Chevelle was also sold as the Pontiac Tempest and the Oldsmobile F-85 and the Buick Special so that the brand differentiation became muddled.

Now the guy who could barely afford a Chevy Biscayne was tooling around in some miniature car branded “Buick.” The brand differentiation began to fade. The genie was out of the bottle. In short order, Chevrolet meant nothing relative to Pontiac, relative to Oldsmobile, relative to Buick.

Worse, the brands meant nothing to GM either. It was the era of badge engineering. GM built “platforms” and then “branded” them for sale at their different dealerships. A Chevy was a Pontiac was an Oldsmobile was a Buick and, for a while, even a Cadillac.

In sum, who gave a crap anymore? Especially since many of us had discovered Volkswagens and Toyotas.

At the time my friends and I bought our first foreign cars, the mullahs at GM mused “they’ll be back when they’re ready for a grown-up car.” To tell you the truth, I thought so, too.

But when my VW wore out and it was time to look for a new car, GM had already destroyed the very marketing model that was supposed to have induced me to “step up” into an Oldsmobile-that-didn’t-belong-to-my-father.

Not only that, GM cars were fat, ugly, and fell apart. The 1990’s Chevrolet Impala was also the Buick Roadmaster and in either case made an Edsel look like a candidate for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

Meanwhile VW had developed its upmarket Audi, Toyota had developed its upmarket Lexus, Honda had developed its upmarket Acura, and Nissan had developed its upmarket Infiniti—each of them tearing the same page out of the same tattered, torn, and long-discarded GM playbook.

So, have you driven a Ford lately?

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One of my many youthful velleities was to become an electrical engineer—an aspiration that came to a grinding halt one day in a math class where the teacher was talking about vectors: certainly not the most challenging concept you’ll encounter in mathematics, but I knew I was operating at the scruffy fringes of my trigonometric frontier.

I had a better chance of becoming a ballerina than an electrical engineer. So I suppose my hobby— restoring and collecting antique radios—is a sort of psychological compensation. Better a lifelong wannabe than a chronic poseur.

Now as my grandfather used to say in the earlier stages of his decrepitude, “Why am I telling you this?” And I’m happy to report that I can remember.

To wit, per yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, in one of the Obama Administration’s biggest efforts at shaping industrial policy, the Energy Department has been soliciting applications for $2.4 billion in funding aimed at turning the U.S. into a manufacturing powerhouse of lithium-ion batteries.

Hold onto that phrase, “shaping industrial policy.”

Lithium-ion batteries are a new technology that has emerged as the leading choice to power future electric cars—which haven’t been completely invented yet—which is okay, because nobody has come up with a way to mass produce the lithium-ion batteries, either.

The confluence of these two formidable obstacles—along with the fact that these batteries have been “hindered by a relatively high price, limited durability, and safety concerns,”   I think, make this the perfect project for taxpayer financing.  But anyway…

The committee or person in charge of “shaping industrial policy” has made two assumptions: that the trajectory of battery-powered automobile development will stay its present course; and that no battery technology superior to lithium-ion cells will be equally nascent or further developed by the time that first battery-powered cars are fully invented.

America has never had an official “industrial policy,” which is a set of actions meant to affect which & what products are produced in a country. Instead, we ostensibly depend on market forces and consumer demand to provide guidance to individual companies, which act on the information as they see fit.

But that’s not to say we don’t have a rich and varied history of screwing around with our domestic markets by way of taxes, tariffs, trade laws, and—my personal favorite—WAR. Consider:

After the U.S. entered World War I, President Wilson, noting that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, outlawed all amateur and commercial radio. Private radio stations were shut down or taken over by the government, and it was illegal to even possess a radio transmitter or receiver.

And this was before Howard Stern.

In effect, radio became a government monopoly, and it could encourage or discourage any technology it wished by way of its funding one over the other.

The government—particularly the Navy—was interested in the military application of radio, and they heavily funded vacuum tube development, which might have been the greatest blunder in technological history. Or maybe not. But consider:

The vacuum tube was invented at the beginning of the 20th century as a “detector,” which is a simple gadget that converts alternating RF waves into a direct voltage that will drive a loudspeaker with intelligible speech or recognizable music.

It was invented by Englishman J.A. Fleming, exploiting the eponymous “Edison Effect” noted by the American inventor in 1877, who was trying to improve the lifespan of “his” electric light bulbs. Edison thought what he discovered to be only a curiosity, and so neither exploited nor patented it—and this in a day when inventors were trying to patent their spit.

The first vacuum tubes were not much better than the competing technology, which were naturally-occurring galena crystals that when poked with wire in the right places and placed in series with a radio wave would “detect” speech and music by converting the voltage to DC.

What gave vacuum tubes an edge was the invention of the audion tube by Lee DeForest, which was able to amplify its input signal—giving it an important advantage over crystals. Or did it?

Electron theory was speculative and in its infancy. Solid-state atomic physics were unknown. The men and women who were inventing radio and diddling with tubes and crystals were essentially tinkerers, fiddling with this and that to see what works. They had little if any idea of the theory behind their successes and failures, which is not too different from how I feel when I finally get an old Philco to work.

The history of the development of the vacuum tube is richly detailed in technological history. The history of crystals isn’t, except we know that many inventors were experimenting with dual crystals side by side, poking them at their junction with wires in an effort to increase the input signal strength.

And if that sounds familiar to you, here’s why:

The bipolar junction transistor was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in 1948 while working at Bell Labs when they stumbled upon the amplifying effect produced by closely-spaced metal contacts touching a germanium crystal semiconductor. They won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in 1956, along with William Shockley, who improved upon their design.

In sum, without World War I and government intervention, it’s reasonable to speculate that the transistor age could have started sometime in the late 1900s instead of 48 years later, followed closely by ICs, digital computers, the space age, Tang, American Idol, and everything else that came afterward.

Or maybe not. Private industry was all aglow with vacuum tubes, too. And really, what do I know? After all, I’m not an electrical engineer.

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