Alan Gutierrez

Editor’s note: After four years of being empowered by nonprofits, recovery planning processes, and community congresses, New Orleanians have become connoisseurs of empowerment. Which is why I thought you’d all find this very interesting.

Lately, Craigslist has been working hard to empower predators to find and murder victims who are disenfranchised and not likely to turn to law enforcement for protection. The details of this new afillate program are just coming into view, but the Craigslist Killer program promises to provide a high murder-to-earnings ratio.

What you might not know is that Craigslist is leveraging a market that they’ve been instrumental in creating. What’s more, it has been just as lucrative for Craigslist as it has been empowering for women.

The Craigslist Killer is an extension of ongoing efforts of Craigslist to empower women to start their own prostitution businesses. They do this by providing a marketplace for sexual services that is self-moderated by pimps and johns. The cruel regulatory hand of government had tried curtail Craigslist empowerment program, noting that prostitution is illegal and citing the use of Craigslist for child prostitution. Empowerment organizations know however, that empowerment is all about laying claim to success with plenty of distance in the event of failure.

As always, there are critics of social media’s efforts to empower women. We as social media mavens know that any criticism of social media is uninformed and hysterical. Bad things can’t happen in social media, because you have to get up from the computer to physically hurt other people. (Duh!) Therefore, it is important that we as social media mavens respond by whistling in the dark.

There was this advertisement for a pain reliever that tried to invent a new pain to treat, the pain of holding your children close, and it would be a laugh out loud failure, if it didn’t hit the brown note.

Do You Suffer from Babies?

When you watch the Motrin Moms ad, at first it is annoying, but there is this magic that happens as you replay it. For some reason, it is easy to watch again and again. It bounces along at nice clip, it is well animated, well narrated, and each time, it reaches out and insults your intelligence with a gentle plucking of a cord.

With the all the digital fervor of the online mob that mistakes their pursuit of customer service complaints for political action, a subset of the Twitter community has minted a bold new hashtag, and is pressing their message through Twitter search trends. On Monday, when whoever has the Motrin account arrives at their desk, there is a good chance that the advertisement will be pulled, a mea cupla issued, and the outraged Twitter users will squee triumphant. We’ll have to hear about the power of social media to effect social change for the remainder of the week.

The advertisement is indeed tone deaf. It is a reminder that you can’t always manufacture a problem for your product to solve, a la Don Draper and Mad Men. People won’t always cover their mouths, scrunch up their arms, put on extra baggy clothes and scurry off the pharmacy for the suggested chemical perfumes.

Sometimes they’ll just say, “who the hell are you to call me ugly?”
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Microsoft has released a new advertisement, after the Jerry Sienfeld and Bill Gates advertisements (Shoe Circus, A Family Affair), which had the look and feel of sitcom spun-off of the Seinfeld TV Show of yesteryear. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jerry and Bill go from one ordinary domestic setting to the next, brining their own brand (Jerry’s brand) of humor with them. One episode even had an entire sitcom family.

These were generally referred to as the commercials about nothing.

Now the advertising has made a preposterous leap to an incredibly defensive ad campaign.

The ad is passive-aggressive with a chilly tone of righteous indignation. I recalls the haughty politically correct types that I’d encounter in Ann Arbor. You might be talking about the Atlanta Braves when someone at the table says, “Well, my great grandfather was half Chippewa Native-American,” and glowers at you. Everyone stops talking about baseball and starts talking about nothing.

They start with a John Hodgeman look alike saying, “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” Then they run through a litany of people who say that they are a PC, but they are not hip, they wear glasses, they study genes, they are not human doings but human beings, and they are all PCs.

Immediately, I recalled Principal Blackman’s You’re A Racist educational film from Strangers With Candy, the comedy that parodied the after school specials that are so familiar to me as a television weened child of the 80’s. (The video is available. Please click play.)

The ad campaign fails for me because of this overlay. More after the jump.
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I am a Democrat. I am a supporter of Barack Obama. I want Barack Obama to win the election and become President of the United States.

Which is why I’m so happy to see Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. When I watched the clip above, I was able to laugh out loud at Sarah Palin for the first time. Much needed.

It was a fun and clever satire of the accusations of sexism that have been bandied about in the two weeks since Sarah Palin’s debut.

What I like most of all about the SNL skit is that it completely deflated Sarah Palin. For two weeks, Sarah Palin, marched forward with a message of wide-eyed denial about every aspect of her record, defended by a phalanx of operatives who labeled all inquiries into her abilities as sexist. As it seemed that she would get away with, there were the early stages of Bush Derangement Syndrome setting in among the Democratic faithful, a condition that is often fatal for Democratic political campaigns.
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I’ve found it easier to write lately. I’d had writer’s block. I’ve got a whole bunch of Writeboards in a backlog of writing. Long complicated scribbles.

Blogging ought to be easy. It hasn’t been. Blogging had become professional communication. It was a perpetual press release. It had become and odious chore.

I was afraid of turning into one of those pro-bloggers. My experiences with social media ran counter to the breathless self-referential raving of the Web 2.0 crowd.

What strikes me about a lot of these pro-blogs is the profound absence of critical thinking. People find a niche and then build a web of people who are only seeking confirmation for what they already believe.

That is the nature of pro-blogging. Coming up with a pet of an idea, then flogging it with anecdotal evidence in the form of anecdotes.

I once ran across this horrible blog post about Henry Ford and The Secret. Remember The Secret from last year? It’s the bible of the Just World Hypothesis.

The blog post was entitled Why Henry Ford Knew More Than “The Secret”. Every time I see Henry Ford, that image pops to mind, the one of him getting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle pinned to his label by the Honorary vice-consul of the Third Reich in Detroit, Fritz Hailer pops to mind. Henry Ford the virulent anti-Semite held up as model of positive thinking.

I felt like I was all lined up to slide down the chute of the idiot pro-blogger, so I didn’t blog much at all.

Celebrating John Frum Day on Vanuatu.

Some folks have written to show concern. I appreciate the concern.

I’m still getting email about policy matters. I’m inclined to respond with, oh, wow, very interesting. Hey, seen what I’ve been up to lately?

I’m going to enjoy being rid of these people who engage me as a resource, people who have no resources to offer. That has been particularly tiring.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many New Orleanians are engaged in a cargo cult dance to bring down some form of funding for the grassroots efforts that drive the recovery. They dress up, wave the sticks, march and dance, and but the DC-3s do not land. The cargo is not for us.

It’s uncommon that local efforts are overlooked, that nonprofit organizations parachute in and disappear as quickly.

An easy decision now to go blue. Want to set the precedent, so that I’m not conflicted when I feel an urge to curse. When I do curse for the first time, I don’t want to add a paragraph about how I don’t usually curse.

A sanitation worker on St. Philip. He sweeps a Coke can into a dustpan at the end of long vacuum cleaner like handle. He drops the Coke can in to a rolling fifty gallon trash can. He rolls toward Derbingy St, back the way I came. I’m wondering if the rest of my walk to the French Quarter will be Coke can free.

More than half the structures on this block are abandoned, there are vacant lots on either side, the upriver sidewalk is overgrown and crumbling, tires are basking in the sun in puddles of mud, while the worker rolls onward in search of a particular type of refuse. Packaging, I assume.

The sidewalks reconstitute themselves as I approach Claiborne. They are solid. I imagine them to have just been throughly swept, although there are tell tale scraps of wrappers. At Claiborne I see a troop of men with brooms, bins and pans rolling along underneath I-10. I wonder why one man decided to make a detour down St. Philip.