Curmudgeon Lives On!

Well you just never know, do ya? I decided not to give up too soon.

The Inner Curmudgeon has been rumbling again. This time, it's about bullying behavior.

I've noticed increasingly there's a trend to think it's OK to bully, or to behave in a way that I would consider is bullying. For example on last night's Law and Order, a new episode, there was a suspect who at the end accused the Sam Waterson character of thinking he was guilty because he "had attitude". Yes, he was black, and he was a recording studio owner for rap artists. These are the very group often emulated by white performers these days, and performer wannabes -- and in fact in my very own little isolated part of the world, the North Coast, there are many, many of these wannabes. The local paper's Thursday Entertainment section is full of nothing else but this type of "music". In the tv show, the character admittedly had reasons that seemed to be good ones for his behavior, which consisted of basically not taking any shit from anybody anywhere any time, and the way he showed he wouldn't take it was to come on strong at the first glint of assertiveness from anyone else, to get right up in their face with strong language and threatening looks, and stay in their face until the other party backed down.

My question of the moment is, Is this sort of thing really necessary, except in extreme circumstances?

There are two tv commercials that seem to think bully-type behavior is enjoyable to the point of being able to inspire people to buy things. The worse one is for my regional cable tv company, Suddenlink (a successor to Cox Communications). This is done in cartoon form and frankly I find the commercial so offensive that I would have gone to another cable company if there were one available. In the commercial, there's the Suddenlink name logo on the screen, and along comes an icon-character, hopping across the screen right-to-left, which represents the Dish Network. It looks like a stick figure with a dish for a head. When this dish-icon gets midscreen, the l from the Suddenlink name comes hopping out to greet the dish-icon. The l bends as if kissing the dish on each cheek, and then quickly grabs the dish-shaped part of the icon and puts it on the l's top or head, like a hat and hops away with it, back toward the rest of the Suddenlink lineup of letters. From there the l tosses the dish like a frisbee to some of the other letters, while the dish-icon, without its own head, tries desperately to get its dish back. In the end it falls down dead. And that is the end of the commercial.

The second one that offends me uses people. It's a commercial for AG Edwards, an investment company. There's a sort of pudgy, soft-looking 40ish man gathering up his belongings from a desk in a typical office, putting them into a box, obviously moving on either to retirement or to a new job. His colleagues say a warm goodbye and he goes awkwardly out the door. You get the feeling this pudgy guy probably does most things awkwardly. He gets down the hall and realizes he's forgotten something, so he goes back to his office, where meanwhile his colleagues are gleefully taking the place apart, laying claim to his desk lamp, his keyboard and so on, obviously delighted that he's gone. The poor guy looks slapped in the face. But he gets himself together and goes to a cabinet, opens the doors and takes out his Nest Egg, which is quite large, and leaves with it. So in this commercial the underdog wins because he has his big nest egg, but really, was that other demonstration necessary? It's like being threatened to make you save money.

I deplore this kind of thing. I'd like to know why it's so pervasive now. Really.

-- DD