Happy Grounding Day! The editors of the StarChamber would like
to remind you to enjoy this special midsummer holiday, first described in this space
last year. Mischief
is afoot, the summer is at the top of its arc, and aliens are abroad. And if there
aren’t any aliens here on Earth, well then, we’ve sent our own to Mars.
By the way, careful readers of these pages will recall that we scooped the movie Contact
with a
tale of our own
on these pages about beaming bad TV across the galactic void. Of course
the book Contact came out years ago, but we will gently step over this
fact by noting that we
never took the time to read it.
In the meantime, for the admirers of that noble verse form, the double dactyl, we
herewith include a humble example of our own:
Life on MarsPathfinder, Sojourner:
Where are your pictures of
Martian inhabitants
For us to see?Is it because of some
Extraterrestrial
Pusillanimity:
Fear of TV?
So in honor of Grounding Day (and before it’s too late), why not avail yourselves of the pleasantries of summer?
Fix yourself a martini concocted with iciest gin, juiciest olive, merest
hint of vermouth, sit on the back porch and read A Midsummer Night’s Dream
one more time. Or better yet, pull up a
chair and consider with us the
curious tale of Ellery Fox.
Pinto
“Near the end of the last century, the art of marketing emerged from its crude
mass-appeal beginnings to the highly networked point-market science we know
today. The culmination of this historic trend was the appearance of the Personal
Needs Technician (PNT), the so-called Pinto.”
– J. Ogilvy, Marketing in the 21st Century, Rand-Bismarck Publishing
Curiously, the promotion did not sit well. Which is not to say that Ellery Fox,
database guru of the profitability department, did not
deserve it. But he was deeply ambivalent about the extra money. Money means
more freedom, more fun, right? But he knew that he quite honestly had money
enough already — he had already left a much higher paying consulting job in New York to
move west for the windsurfing. The religious guilt of his upbringing tugged
at him fitfully. More money seemed to both confuse and thrill him.
More specifically he was annoyed the news was first delivered by his irritating
former officemate Fleming. Stork-like and angular, Walter Fleming (affectionately
known in the Profitability group as Phlegm) thought he was successfully concealing
his envy, but he was in fact spilling it messily all over Fox’s carpet. “Pulled down
the big promotion, eh? Well three cheers to you, big guy, heh-heh.” Here
he made an abrupt and strangely aggressive toasting gesture, thrusting his
stained coffee mug toward Fox. Fox managed a thin smile and watched the
sloshing mug anxiously. Fleming continued, “I bet you get a Pinto for this.”
“Walter, you know that only the guys on the executive team get those.
I don’t even want one. What the hell would I do with some glorified ad man
chasing me around all day?”
Fleming raised an eyebrow and tipped his head toward Fox skeptically. Then came the
maddening mechanical laugh: “Heh-heh. Yeah right, and I don’t want to be Bill Gates.”
His head bent quickly and sipped from his agitated mug. “I bet you get one.
Those guys can work wonders.
Heh-heh.” And with that, Fleming poked his free hand into his pocket and
ambled stiffly back into the hall.
“As a result of high-speed communications networks, point-of-sale identification infrastructure,
and advanced neural prediction software, marketing experts had enough information to exactly
predict the needs of their clientele. From this point, it was a simple jump to assign individual
specialists, PNTs, to highly-compensated wage-earners. Freed from the horrendous expense of
mass-targeted advertising, marketing money was channeled directly to Needs Technicians who
expertly matched client income with corporate product.”
– J. Ogilvy, Marketing in the 21st Century
“I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in!” were the words that Peter Martinez, Personal
Needs Technician, First Class, used to greet Ellery Fox on his arrival home that night. Fox,
doubly stunned, was still standing in the doorway. Stunned once: this stranger, this bizarre
marketing person whose arrival had been predicted by his co-worker,
had broken into his house and re-arranged his living room. Stunned twice:
the place looked great. All he could think to say to the affable man standing in the kitchen
doorway was “Where did you find that Hokusai print?” This was in reference to a magnificent
Japanese print tastefully framed and hanging over the mantel.
“Isn’t it great? I knew you wanted it. I’ve been doing my homework on you ever since I got the good news
last month.”
“The good news?”
“Your promotion, silly! Human Resources automatically notifies the firm and gives us
the necessary powers of attorney and so on. It’s all very pro forma.” He smiled brightly, brown eyes
twinkling merrily and utterly without malice.
“You’ve known for a month…?” Fox’s voice trailed off in bafflement. He took in the scene:
his computer was now atop the elegant maple desk he’d been considering buying for a year or more.
The piles of magazines he’d
been meaning to straighten up were neatly stacked. The floor was spotless. “Did you clean the place up too?”
“Oh, no no no. You see, I’m not a butler. I simply use your money to acquire the goods and services you’d get
for yourself, in an ideal world. In this case, I arranged for a very pleasant young woman from
the Philippines to clean the house Wednesdays.” He leaned forward and added significantly, “…
that’s your soccer night.”
“I’d been planning to do that,” said Fox in a small wary voice.
“YES!” exclaimed Martinez, nodding vigorously, a fountain of good will, “of course you had! Don’t you see?”
“As our ability to gather
accurate information on a wide scale becomes more and more powerful, we
expect to make sweeping gains in efficiency, enabling us to employ PNTs with households of
lower and lower combined salaries. It is not an overstatement to say that we are
on the cusp of an unprecedented rise in human fulfillment.”
– J. Ogilvy, Marketing in the 21st Century
As life became better and better for Ellery Fox, he became more and more
miserable. There was no better illustration that his life was without meaning than the fact that
his every desire could be pinpointed by the PNT firm within minutes of its coalescing in his brainstem. What
depressed him even more was the fact that Martinez was always a step ahead of him,
even when Fox was in a funk. Just when he would decide he needed a vacation to some remote island, Martinez
would drop off tickets for a well-researched trip to the Galapagos. But then of course, he HAD always wanted to go
to the Galapagos, and Martinez cheerfully reminded him there would be a partial eclipse of the sun
while he was there. “Go ahead, you deserve it!” was
the Pinto catch-phrase, and it echoed endlessly in Fox’s head.
So off he’d go to the Galapagos or the Upper Cascades or Katmandu, and somehow the more it was
everything he’d hoped it would be, the
more it depressed him. He had bleak visions of
planning a suicide only to have Martinez appear at the last minute and offer the neatest, best-researched, and most
tasteful exit strategy (”Go ahead, you deserve it!”). It was like being beaten to death by Martha Stewart.
One morning he found tickets to a New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s 9th in his desk drawer
at the exact instant that he had begun to hum it, and something snapped. He knew that if he rid
himself of all his money, there would no longer be any economic logic to having a Pinto. Sell the
house, move to the country, …
The phone rang; it was Martinez. “Great news!”
Fox cried “No, no more great news, Peter! You listen to me for once—”
Martinez continued without pausing, “I got a terrific price for your house, and I was able to cancel on the
Beethoven concert. I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“Indeed, the day is not far off when we may expect to see
one-to-one or greater ratios of PNTs to the non-PNT population: Mankind in the service of marketing,
and marketing in the service of mankind.”
– J. Ogilvy, Marketing in the 21st Century
From inside the scrubbed whitewashed walls of the old monastery, Ellery Fox contemplated with satisfaction the realities of
his life of simple poverty. No more money, no more anxiety, only thin gruel in the morning and the daily
rituals of devotion. Now he spent most of his time preparing for his mission work and
chanting hymns in the name of infinite compassion.
His physical and mental health would have been at a peak had it not been for a chance encounter in the
temple courtyard. For there, walking serenely in the orange robes of a priest, was Peter Martinez.
“Peter,” Fox called out with a smile, “you’ve given it up, too, all that rat-race nonsense? Good for you!”
Martinez turned slowly and surveyed him with beatific calm. “What do you mean?” A quaking began
in Fox’s knees and moved quickly into his thumping chest. “No no no, Ellery Fox! I still perform my
mission work in the name of infinite compassion.”
“But… you never…” rasped Fox.
Martinez shined his smiling face on Fox. “Ellery, listen: Marx said that religion was the opiate of the
masses. But he got it wrong.” His brown eyes glimmered with saintly benevolence; his white teeth gleamed.
Fox was suddenly aware of a warm sense of bliss spreading across his chest. Martinez continued, “If you want to
save the world, you need to use the right tools. Your mission time will come soon…” Martinez kept such good
care of his teeth! “We’ve just gotten word that Fleming has received his promotion.”
