I have been feeling a good amount of despair recently. Not on a personal level-I’m generally as happy-go-lucky as a leprechaun with a head injury. (It’s weird!) But the constant reminder of the American lack of empathy is astounding. It’s everywhere. (Do we need to drag in the case of the woman who attended the Glenn Beck rally in D.C. over the weekend and her point of view that Jesus would hate welfare?) And so it was with great wariness that I approached the comments section at the end of this first-person story by a man in Nevada who, driven into destitution by disability, family medical bills, the current lack of work and shady landlords, will find himself homeless at midnight tomorrow. These comments: well, they did disappoint. They went from awful to judgmental to trashing to witch hunt.

These comments include the following! Verbatim!

• Rodger sure has made some poor choices.

• In many parts of the world this man would be rich.

• Maybe he really is a victim, but so many on the street got there by their own hand.

• What a sob story. His girlfriend needs to get her butt out to Mcdonalds and find a job.

• Come on. Bad choices were made all along that got you to this point.

• I hate to see this but also agree with many regarding the largely self induced nature of their plight.

• What’s going on now is called Economic Darwinism.

• Everyone wants help..but it has been said..If you need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm…and if you search, you will find that you have two hands..one to help someone else..

• I don’t mind working 40 hours/week, clipping coupons to buy my own groceries, being conservative with my purchases, keeping my utility bills low, and such … it’s all worth it if I can pay extra taxes for others to not get a job and buy cigarettes and other small luxuries. Oh wait, yes I do mind. I suppose that makes me a bad person.

• When you look closely at most poor people it is apparent that they decided to be poor.

• Rodger is a bum.

• Seems the truth about this guy is coming to light now! Lets see what happens when the light is turned bright and he gets investigated for some of these scams we are now hearing about.

And that’s when I stopped reading finally. This seems really outrageous. I feel pretty bad about people!

Here is some excellent news, courtesy of a study from the University of Texas at Austin which followed 1,824 participants over a period of 20 years: proficient drinkers live longer than their teetotal contemporaries.

Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk. One important reason is that alcohol lubricates so many social interactions, and social interactions are vital for maintaining mental and physical health. As I pointed out last year, nondrinkers show greater signs of depression than those who allow themselves to join the party.

It’s not a 100% endorsement of the advanced drinker’s life: middling drinkers (defined here as those who take 1–3 a day) live longer than the professionals. Still, there’s plenty of good to take away from this, unless you happen to be a non-drinker. Although you’re probably happy to die early given your joyless, alcohol-free existence.

Footnotes of Mad Men: From Lubricated to Morose

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Don Draper didn’t know his father, so he examines figures of male authority that he dreads becoming. One is Roger Sterling. Unfortunately, Don’s current trajectory points to a Sterling finish. Right now, he’s an entitled lush who skips out on his family, cuts corners, sleeps with the secretaries and-worst of all-he settles for mediocre copy. One day you’re taking a drunken self-congratulatory lap around a conference room of potential clients, the next day you’re in a dusty corner office wistfully dictating your memoir to a bored secretary.

• The Vicks Chemical Company for which Peggy and the beastly art director strip down to brainstorm plays a significant role in the liturgy of advertising. Vicks is where Draper Daniels got his start in the industry. The Chemical Company offered aspiring ad men a crack at copywriting in their New York offices if they spent a year in the field pitching Vicks’ products door to door. “A salesman,” Daniels wrote in his autobiography, Giants, Pygmies and other Advertising People, “traveling, or otherwise, was the last thing in the world I wanted to be, but the ‘plus expenses and a car [offer]’ shattered any sales resistance.” After a year of canvassing the South in the name of cough syrup and vapor rub, Daniels landed in the New York headquarters and was eventually hired by Young and Rubicam, the premier ad agency of the 1940s. Per Daniels: ‘Young and Rubicam was heaven, or the next door to it, and God’s name was Rubicam.”

• Cold medicine also served as a histamine-free muse for one of the other advertising greats: Julian Koenig.

Koenig, a copywriter, and George Lois, art director, were the first ad and copy team to break off and start their own boutique company (Papert, Koenig, Lois) after their success with the Volkswagen campaign (Think Small and Lemon) at Doyle Dane Bernbach. The upstart ad agency garnered a good deal of esteem in 1964 when their commercial for Xerox nabbed a Clio for this quite dry but very effective ad.

• The April 1965 copy of Playboy that the Stan was thumbing through featured the following pieces:

— An interview: Art Buchwald

— Excerpt from ‘Man With The Golden Gun’ by Ian Fleming

— “The Force of Habit” by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty.

Getty had this to say:

The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.

• So what of the ‘Klan-ad’ cameo in the new art director’s resume?

This was part of the historic Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater from 1964. President Johnson hired DDB to produce the spots. The Klan commercial never ran, largely because the first spot in the series caused such a furious reaction from the GOP and television viewers. This was the Daisy spot.

(Better resolution here.)

It only ran once but that was enough (50 million people were watching). News programs ran the ad, newspapers covered the reactions: anyone who hadn’t seen the ad was sure to have been told about it. The GOP chairman, Dean Burch, filed a formal complaint to the Fair Election Practices committee: “This horror-type commercial is designed to arouse basic emotions and has no place in this campaign.”

Well, Burch was right. “The commercial evoked a deep feeling in many people that Goldwater might actually use nuclear weapons,” said Tony Schwartz, the ad-man responsible for Daisy and the never aired Klan spot. Schwartz, whose major client before the White House was American Airlines, also said: “the stimuli of the film and sound evoked these feelings and allowed people to express what they inherently believed.”

There is, however, no Clio award to be had in the category of political advertising.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of ‘em.

“Pew’s analysis also makes a point that reflects what I’m proposing here: ‘Beliefs about Obama’s religion are closely linked to political judgments about him.’ Given that, much of the perturbed commentary that’s followed the Obama/Muslim result is misplaced. When we think of this not as an affirmed belief, but an expression of antipathy, the tortured explanations become unnecessary. The reality is that attitudes, including expressions of ‘belief,’ are influenced by underlying sentiments. With political emotions running high, as they customarily do at times of severe economic stress, it’s a point worth keeping in mind — believe you me.”
-Pollster Gary Langer explains that maybe all those people who think Barack Obama is a Muslim don’t actually think that; they just don’t like Obama and want to express how terrible he is, which they do by claiming to believe that he is a member of the Islamic faith. So we’re all okay then! [Via]

Here are Saturday Night Live’s three new cast members. About two of them, not much is known! In particular because it seems like the “digital strategy” at SNL is to make new cast members delete everything off the Internet upon hiring. It is an interesting position. In any event, at this time there’s no telling how my season pass will fare. Will episodes continue to accumulate in their little folder, waiting for that week that I come down with a broken femur or something and run out of trashy movies? Could be! IF ONLY the Internet had a blog related to all things comedic to tell me what I think of this.

Paper Declares Guy With Gut A Risk Of Boat Capsizing

Oh my God, now I feel bad about my body: “Why does Christina Aguilera look so blue while cruising with hubby Jordan Bratman off Italy’s Isle of Capri? Maybe it’s because her big-as-ahouse spouse looks like he might sink the yacht.”

Awl pals Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister want to know: Where is the Democrats’ Sarah Palin?

These things happen: “According to witnesses, the ordeal began when a monkey escaped its enclosure at the park. Jungle Island employees began to chase the monkey back into its area when the monkey jumped into the tigers’ enclosure. One of the tigers, 3-year-old Mahesh, leaped after the monkey and out of the enclosure. Israel Salabarra, a witness, said, ‘All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this tiger just comes leaping in the air with one paw up.’” [Via]

There are two things I do not give a flying fig about, and those are tennis and people who live outside of New York who have opinions on local landmark and zoning permit issues. Man, seriously, shut up about the tennis! I know: you people like it. That’s nice. That being said, if you are a New Yorker subscriber, which surely you are, then you can read about the British Open, which is much more interesting in the telling by John McPhee than the U.S. Open is through the channels of the various unintelligible Twitters of New York Times employees with extraordinarily nebulous jobs.

I would look up the “print” in the Oxford English Dictionary, but first I’d have to shell out $300 for a subscription. I imagine it’s a pretty archaic word anyway: “Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday so many people prefer to look up words using its online product that it’s uncertain whether the 126-year-old dictionary’s next edition will be printed on paper at all.”