It was good to see the Steelers win the Superbowl on Sunday. We had a little gathering in Newton but it wasn’t nearly as intense as the past few years with the Patriots in the big game. Before the game Sarah and I took a walk around Crystal Lake with Madeline. At one point on the lake just after getting off of Beacon street there is a cove where you can climb into the water. I have some good memories of that cove like the time that I went skinny dipping with Ami and Ilana after college and getting covered with leeches. It also was the site of the closest I ever came to getting arrested.

A friend and I were swimming in the late evening on a hot august day. A police officer spotted us swimming in the lake outside of the designated public swimming zone. He waved us in and then gave a long speech about how illegal it is to swim in the lake and went over the potential for it to go onto our permanent records and ruin our future lives. The officer then called my parents to let them know that I had been breaking the law. My father had a chuckle about it when he received the call since he is no fan of the policy that people can’t swim in lakes. I think the officer was just collecting every high school student in town into his little arrest book. I bumped into him at a wrestling meet a few years later and he bragged that he had every student in the high school in his book with the crimes they had committed. I challenged him because I thought I was enough of a goody-goody to be in his book. Sure enough he had me in the little notepad with the date and time of the lake swimming incident.

Sarah noticed a beautiful house across the street from where I had been stopped for swimming. I remember that house because it was Anna Rosenblum’s house. Her father was a famous sculptor and in 9th grade during French class I had developed a crush on my partner – Anna Rosenblum. We had gotten together to study, practice, write a sketch or something in the house. It had been the closest to a date with a girl that I had been on so I was flush with hormones, pheremones, and insane developmental illnesses. She was wearing a pair of 80’s pre-faded and pre-torn blue jeans. Due to an intense mixture of fear in all directions I panicked and pretended to hate Anna in front of my friends to avoid embarrassment. I then played a prank on her that roughly equated to providing an imaginary secret admirer. Since I was too chicken to actually be the secret admirer it was easier to make it into a mean prank than to be straightforward about it. The massive fear in all directions is the odd thing about being in 9th grade. You are afraid of girls, being unpopular, failing in school, disappointing your parents. It’s a scary time. You do very strange things that one would only expect to see in a bad teen movie. For this reason alone I am willing to believe any motivation for a character in a bad teen movie.

I have been thinking often about fear lately. Maybe it is because the US is so focused on these people called “terrorists”. Terror is the extreme of fear. But using fear to control behavior is nothing new. In marketing we don’t focus on what products can do but what pains the products can alleviate. People don’t buy things –five blade razors, luxury motor cars, political mantras, or enterprise software unless they are convinced that the purchase will alleviate a fear that has been nagging them for ages. So us marketing folks try to highlight the chronic pain that they or their organization is in and suggest the potential circles of hell that they will land in if they don’t purchase our product. Some people tend to think that only a dictatorship can be run on fear but a pure democratic capitalist society with everyone marketing their own personal messages of fear are bound to accumulate a large collection of fear. So do we really fear the terrorists because of the murderous crimes that they perpetrate or because of the media machine, politicians, and corporations have something to sell and the fear is the easiest way to get us to buy?

So just to return to the big marketing event - the Superbowl. We do get some football sugar to help the medicine go down. But the medicine this yaer is to buy cars that run on corn power. Somewhere hidden between the State of the Union and the Superbowl is some secret pact between the politicians, the farmers, and the automotive industry to give our American car manufacturers an edge. We're moving to corn power according to the Superbowl advertisements and it is coming too fast for the foreign car companies to make better cornmobiles. Since we control our own super economy we may as well take advantage of the monopoly by adjusting the scales. Maybe we can avoid some foreign wars this way. Isn't that the idea behind the cornmobile. Go daddy go!