YACK on: Deserving
Grant Sanders

Shhh. Can you hear it? Can you see it? The signs are everywhere. You simply need to be astute enough and sensitive enough to see them. They’re subtle, you know. But if you can stop yourself, take a break from whatever impor-tant thing you are doing, look around, sniff the air, maybe throw a few blades of grass up in the air to test for wind direction, and cup your hand around your ear, you may just gain a faint whiff of a notion that maybe — just maybe — we’re all a bunch of big, fat selfish jerks. In one way or another. Even you. Even me.

It’s bad enough that some of us drive those nasty SUV things. (Mine squeaks a bit when I drive over the cobblestones so that wealthy chil-dren from Connecticut stop and stare and wonder if I’m driving over a guinea hen.) It’s bad enough we use four-wheel drive to further crush the sands on the beach as if eons of surf and glacial wear and tear are not suf-ficiently abusive.

But the thing that really sticks in the craw of the universe is that boxy behemoth known as the Hummer. Why anyone would spend $60,000 for a vehicle that has a hockey score for a highway MPG rating, and can’t drive down India Street without tak-ing out seven side-view mirrors is beyond me.

A Hummer screams, “move aside mere peasants, I’m more important than you. I laugh at your $3.15 regu-lar gas and secretly wish it was even more expensive. I paid $60,000 and change for this baby and you can die screaming beneath my knobby tires if you don’t like the fact that I’m hell bent on consuming 678% of my actual share of the earth’s resources. You’re just jealous. And your truck squeaks.”

(Of course it only screams that if you listen really, really carefully.)

Interestingly, if the Hummer has been parked on Orange Street, it said something completely different last week before someone removed the rude bumper sticker that was on it. It said something I cannot really repeat here. Due to the fact that it might raise a few hackles and the like. But

laughed out load and nearly cracked up my squeaky SUV when I read the words scrawled in wide felt tip marker on blank pressure-sensi-tive stock adhered to the truck’s beige backside.

If you really need to see a picture, go to www.yackon.com, register and go to the forums where you can click on the search button and insert the search string: “Hummer, Orange, Bumper Sticker and Beige.” It’s there.

And that’s another thing. Who in their right mind pays $60,000 for anything that’s beige? Isn’t that like climbing Mount Everest with a portable DVD player just so you can watch re-runs of the Tony Danza talk show when he interviews Fran Dresher? Where I come from, beige is a dirty word. A real no-no. The last time I owned anything beige it was a fake brushed suede leisure suit, and it was 1978 and I was at a youth group dance at the First Baptist Church of Worcester, trying to put the moves on some girl named Kathy.

Beige has not been in style since. I should know. I’m a recognized expert on such things. I’m a success-ful ad guy with a list of name-brand clients a mile long (if you write them in really, really big letters). When one ponders the paradox of a beige Hummer, one has to wonder how anyone with such incredibly bad taste was able to get far enough in life to actually acquire the money needed to purchase the off-brown consumerized Mil-SPEC vehicle in the first place. The thing looks, to me, like a giant turd with square cor-ners.

But I digress.

As an ad guy, one of the little tricks I’ve used to get people to covet things and therefore buy the products for which I’m creating ads, is to tell them that they are actually entitled to something. (You deserve a break today. You deserve a little lux-ury. Treat yourself. You deserve it. Who deserves it more? No one. In fact, you owe it to yourself.)

And whether we deserve some-thing or not (in most cases, not), after hearing a woman in a warm velvet purr of a voice tell us that we deserve something 10 to 12 times a week, well, we not only believe it, we feel it in our bones.

Even if it’s something that we don’t need, or can’t afford, or is essentially evil and bad for the world in general. You see people inherently want to be better than other people. They want the leg up. They want the brass ring. It’s part of our nature to be on top of others of our species. To say, in that sing-songy playground voice, “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.” Or, “In your face.” Which is why a sense of entitlement is a powerful selling tool.

Trust me. I know. It’s my job to know.

There are other signs — subtle signs — out there, if you only look for them, that we are all big fat self-ish jerks to some degree or another. Take a look at the current ban on out-door watering. Why do we have a ban? Not because we are out of water, but because our town wells and pumps are working 24-7 and still can’t keep up with demand because some people feel that watering their lawn is actually important.

Some people feel that a carpet of expansive kelly-green fescues is a good idea. That they deserve to use 500 percent more water than anyone else because, by gum, they’ve worked hard to acquire the trophy home surrounded by a lawn that practically jumps out of the Crayola box, next to which they can park their beige Hummer.

And, they water their lawns according to a carefully regimented schedule. This means that I can’t take my SUV, which squeaks, to the car wash to hose the grime off it. (Which is a good thing as the build-up of dust around the suspension of my SUV has actually attenuated the squeaking by at least 22 percent.)

Another sign of our near omnipresent selfishness and jerkism: the new electric cable from the main-land. Heck, we just put the old elec-tric cable in a few years back and now we are just about ready to bring a brand new one on line. Why? Because it’s far easier to continue to consume than to conserve.

Americans, it should be noted, are really, really good at gobbling. Not so good at pushing ourselves away from the proverbial table. (Did anyone besides me notice that no one from the electric company even sug-gested we try to conserve the elec-tricity we use rather than going full speed ahead with adding another pipeline? I guess that little tidbit of info might have constituted a small conflict of interest.) But what’s the real reason we need a new cable? Air conditioners. Air conditioners that we, after all, deserve. A gentle sum-mer breeze wafting through an open window is not good enough to keep us cool anymore. We deserve better.

Gone are the days when a person could actually smell the ocean when they awoke. Why? Because the air we breathe is now “conditioned.” It’s treated and dehumidified, cooled and filtered for our inhaling and exhaling enjoyment. So what if we are using 150 percent more electricity than a person who sleeps by the open win-dow with the crisp white linen cur-tains blowing gently in the breeze. If one bead of perspiration drips down our necks —just once—we are likely to faint from discomfort and a bout of acute stickiness. Because, damn it, we’re entitled to conditioned air. We deserve conditioned air.

Interestingly, “conditioning” is a term used to describe what we do to dogs to get them to do what we want while making them think they’re get-ting something they want. We feed them treats and give them simple commands and they walk into their kennels or they sit and lie down.

Consider the possibility that per-haps we, as consumers, have been conditioned by those entities that profit from our vast and greedy con-sumption to desire those things which we really do not need and would be better off not having.

An obscenely priced, obscenely wasteful vehicle.

An iridescent green lawn.

Purified and cooled air.

Who is to say? Not me, of course. I’m just as big and fat and selfish and jerky as the next guy. As an ad guy, I’m partially to blame. And, after all, I am entitled.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the chief big, fat selfish jerk of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com. The website’s 22,000 hits per day require more electricity than a small city uses in a month. Or something like that. You owe it to yourself to check it out.

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