LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
- Ending capital punishment is a noble cause that seldom has a convenient poster-boy.
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
- Human bodies, and the care and feeding of same, are among the most researched, most documented topics of study in our species’s short history. The result of this work ought to be an appreciation of the body’s many intricate systems and their multilayered interactions.
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
- Why kids behave the way they do is another topic with assorted major and minor causes all interfacing in myriad ways.
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
- The Puget Sound area’s transportation problems are elaborate, and compounded by ever-further sprawl and the lack of a comprehensive public-transit system.
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
- And if anything’s elaborate, it’s the ways women and men relate to one another. It’s a topic whose assorted permutations have kept many a playwright, novelist, songwriter, and therapist fed and housed over the past few centuries.
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
- Many of the most popular all-time Boho-bookstore faves are guys (and a few gals) who marketed themselves, or allowed themselves to be marketed, as brand-name celebrities, whose most popular works were essentially commercials for their public images (A. Ginsberg, H. S. Thompson, A. Nin).
- In the Way-New Left, some of the causes and sub-causes that attract the most zine ink and volunteer support are those with really simplified storylines, slogans, and actions. (Hemp si! McDonald’s no!)
- I won’t even start in on the too-simple ideas that have ebbed and flowed in popularity among college professors and administrators in the past half-century. Many, many conservative authors (themselves mostly victims of their own too-simple ideologies) have raked in big bucks snorting in print and on the lecture circuit against Those Silly Liberals.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
