Bad taste?

Four hundred pound mother
of triplets begins feeding them
from McDonald’s at six months.

I never thought I would admit to it, but I am a prude. I am not particularly prudish about sex, but, rather, about medical ads in general that I increasingly encounter on TV. I think it is bad enough that pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise their products at all, but they seem over the years to have abandoned all sense of decency or decorum. Just thinking about how much their enormous advertising budgets add to the price of drugs is enough to make me furious. I think if someone thinks they have heart trouble or are hard of hearing or something they should see a doctor. I don’t see why it has to be suggested to them that they might have such problems. If they don’t have them why bring them to their attention.

What truly is bothering me, however, are the ads featuring certain ailments that I just do not want to hear about. I absolutely do not care about people’s armpits, for example. Nor do I care to hear about how absorbent menstrual pads are. Ads for rectal itch or hemorrhoids hold absolutely no interest for me, nor do ads that address leaking bladders, diarrhea, menstrual cramps, breast pumps, or nasal allergies. If I had any of those things bad enough to be bothered by them I am quite certain I would have enough sense to see a doctor. I don’t have to be reminded of every conceivable ailment that exists on a daily basis. Spastic colons and prostate glands and colonoscopies are not things I need to be reminded about. Watching people gargle and brush their teeth I find particularly offensive. Are these really things people have to be instructed to do? One of the most offensive ads of all times going the rounds at the moment has to do with some old people singing about “by, by ooziness.” I don’t even want to hear about false teeth, let alone the substances required to hold them in place. This stuff is just plain disgusting. I think looking up someone’s nostrils or at simulations of their gastric processes are completely unnecessary. Someone having a colonoscopy on television, however noble its motivation, is downright horrid. Along these same lines, I don’t care to watch dental care or even operations, and I especially don’t think people having birth should be sharing it on TV with the rest of us. What I am truly fed up with are the ad nauseam ads having to do with male enhancement and erections. I am sure that if I had such a problem, and could only perform with chemical help, I would certainly not want to share it with the television public. I notice that when these ads first began they were relatively modest, but now you see him leading her right up to the bedroom door. What comes next, the act itself? Am I really that prudish or do I just have good taste? Or have ideas of good and bad taste gone the way of the Dodo bird?

Interestingly enough, I do not feel prudish about seeing wounded or dead bodies on war footage. I don’t like it, and I certainly don’t enjoy it, but I think it is necessary for people to see just how senseless and horrible war really is. When it comes to showing the caskets coming home with our dead military heroes, I think it ought to be required viewing for anyone who thinks war is just something that is happening “over there.” I hate seeing pictures of starving children, refugee camps, and all the attendant misery, but, again, I think everyone should be forced to see them. Perhaps it would help people to come to their senses about the unnecessary misery accompanying so much of humanity (it doesn’t seem to, as near as I can tell).

Probably the worst pictures of all for me are the torture ones. Nothing can compare with seeing people who are bound and completely helpless being abused in ways deliberately conceived for that purpose, and for which there is no excuse, none. Torture nowadays is not only illegal, it is absolutely medieval, a throwback to a time when all the worst features of the imagination were given free reign. If you are ever in the British Museum you should visit their exhibitions having to do with torture. It is virtually unbelievable the lengths humans went to, to inflict the utmost pain possible on their fellows. It went far beyond Abu Ghraib and even waterboarding. But what makes our current torturing worse, I think, is that psychologists and others were actually recruited and paid to determine which forms of abuse would work the best on particular ethnic groups. The enlisted personnel who tortured at Abu Ghraib did not stumble upon those techniques by themselves, they were told what to do by “scientists” who had been employed for the purpose. It was torture, deliberately conceived, by those who should have known better, especially after hundreds of years of the history of such misguided activity. I don’t know if there was any justification for torture in the past, that was probably done as much out of ignorance as anything else, but there is no justification for torture in the 21st century. And those who brought it about should be held accountable for what they have done. If not, it will just happen again.

LKBIQ:
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
H. L. Mencken

TILT:
All rattlesnake species give live birth rather than laying eggs.