Great marketing starts with understanding the target audience and that’s a problem if your audience is Baby Boomers. They’ve puzzled us for decades.

Most of them were decent kids and became decent adults, but they did kick over the traces in the self-involved jerk department.

Based on the usually reliable 80-20 rule, any generation, any group of people for that matter, has a jerk factor of around 20%. Based on simple observation, Boomers are at least double that and that’s probably why they’re the only generation in history that every other generation dislikes.

All those jerks, the Bad Baby Boomers, the BBBs, snuck up on us. We didn’t give them a second thought as overall Boomer numbers approached critical mass around 1955. They were cute and certainly precocious, but we thought they’d grow up to be solid citizens.

We flinched a bit when BBBs began infesting the heart of American culture but we had no history to tell us how it was going to work out. Too late, we began to recoil in horror when they launched their reign of error in the seven week stretch between the JFK assassination on 11/22/63 and The Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan appearance on 2/9/64.

Driving the BBBs was a sense of preening morality behind an aura of faux superiority that created a compelling urge to lecture others. They viewed themselves as heroic altruists.

Their cause, and they needed one to hang their egos on, was the concept of change, mostly changing the US swiftly and radically. Into what, they never said but they organized, rioted and clamored for change anyway and they continue to lecture, hector, nag and lie through their teeth about it.

Because they never understood that the perfect is the enemy of the good, or that “change” is a gradual trial and error process, they never had a good reason to change the US. So they made a few up. The most damaging in the long term was their notion of Social Justice.

They thought MLK had defined Social Justice, but they didn’t pay attention to what he’d been saying. We’ve spent upwards of $30 trillion on Social Justice, anyway, and we have nothing to show for it.

At its root, Social Justice meant justice for blacks and just about everybody thought that was a great idea. MLK’s version was that justice meant equal opportunity for black people and finding a road to bring them into the mainstream of American society.

The BBBs thought, and most still think, that they could bestow equality on blacks with the wave of a wand and a regal “ta da, you’re equal”.

They got the odious concepts of noblesse oblige charity and equality of outcome mixed up with equality before the law and equality of opportunity.

Blacks just needed whitey to get out of the way. Boomers couldn’t allow that because there’s no glory, no sanctimony, no role for special pups in merely getting out of people’s way.

BBBs used the Social Justice issue to beatify themselves.

They thought they were special and they were – special in their ruthlessness, snobbery and slobbering preciousness, exemplified by that photo of a hippie slipping a flower into the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle.

(Excoriating the US, they saw nothing odd in the fact that they lived in one of the few places on earth where it was safe to get close enough to a soldier’s rifle to insert a flower.)

They’ll tell you even now that their intentions were good.

They intended to fight injustice. They failed spectacularly. Focusing on “helping” black people caused blacks to be even worse off 45 years later. By 1960, blacks had been doing pretty well, catching up. They weren’t there yet but they were on their way. Drugs hadn’t wrecked the inner city in 1960, most black children still lived with both parents, and black education and literacy were on the rise. Alas, by 1968, BBBs and their older comrades in arms, Marxists and hangovers from Wilson’s Progressive era, had convinced black people that burning down their own neighborhoods would be a good idea.

They should have known that the welfare state spelled doom for black families. (And, according to Frances Fox Piven, many of them did know.)

BBBs decided to help the North Vietnamese and before you could say Jane Fonda, it was April 30, 1975 and Saigon fell to the communists. The US armed forces skedaddled ignominiously and the real killing began. Communist lunatics murdered millions of Southeast Asians, tore apart families and condemned survivors who had any education at all to lives of serfdom in the countryside.

The communists acknowledge that they couldn’t have succeeded without the help of The New York Times, Walter Cronkite and millions of precious BBBs.

BBBs happily embraced sexual liberation, which they thought was a great idea. And it was a great idea – for irresponsible and callous young men. Millions of abortions, rampant STDs, predominance of single-parent (mostly moms) families and an astonishing divorce rate later, hey, we’re liberated.

Drugs were cool, mind-expanding. BBBs tinkered with marijuana and LSD then added cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin and crystal meth. One result is that Mexico is now a narco-terrorist state with tens of thousands of drug-traffic related murders every year. Another is that our inner cities have crumbled. All thanks to Boomers’ oh-so-liberating insistence that we should all just turn on, tune in, drop out.

The oddest damned thing is that while Boomers were reviling the US and trying to change it, the world was lining up just for a chance to come here and live.

The Boomers wanted to, and nearly did, change the US to resemble the rest of the world which was, and is, mostly a vicious pit of hopeless poverty and appalling ignorance.

The Boomers were rebels and non-conformists. So, naturally, they wore uniforms, starting with tie-dyed T-shirts, headbands, wide bottom jeans with holes at the knees, and rope belts. Now their graying hair is gathered in pony tails that dangle pathetically beneath nature’s tonsures. The look is augmented with earrings on sagging male earlobes. Hard not to laugh.

They decried materialism while amassing more material goods than any generation in history. They meant that materialism was bad for everyone else but not bad for them and that was just practice for their current belief that free speech means “free for me but not for thee”. Kumbaya ethics have always had a nasty Nazi streak.

They had no idea what they were doing. They’d been told they were the elite of the world and they acted like it. The problem is that they really had only one principle: We’re special!! What each of them meant was: I’m special and you are either a sad soul who needs wonderful people like me to guide you through life or you are an evil reactionary who must be mocked and destroyed.

They made heroes out of psychopaths like Che, Castro, Mao, Ho.

They thought they were leaders. They weren’t. They were followers tripping after the pied piper of Cool. You see a bunch of them around the reflecting pond in the movie Forrest Gump. Forrest was worth more than all of them put together.

Very few Boomers ever had ideas of their own. They borrowed and stole ideas from the two or three immediately preceding generations plus a few older romantic whackos like Rousseau and Marx.

Boomers followed pre-Boomers like Saul Alinsky, Joan Baez, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, Alan Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie, LBJ, JFK, RFK, Jack Kerouac, Huey Newton, John Reed, Mario Savio.

Along the way, they managed to latch on to some good ideas – clean air and water, women’s rights, that kind of thing – and that’s a shame because all the BBBs brought to the table was a virulent form of reductio ad absurdum which gave us the infantile musings of Al Gore for climate policy and Gloria Steinem’s idiotic notion that men and women are not only equal but interchangeable.

So how do you sell things to people like this? A little over half of them are normal men and women; the rest are special and will react positively to a pat on the head and “Aren’t you the special one!” Purr.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Last stanza of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men

Whimper is the perfect word to describe government by the precious. Consider this gibberish-riddled plank in the platform of Canada’s Green Party, the Khmer Rouge of the north. (Thanks to smalldeadanimals.com for pointing it out.)

This is a nice idea for a car rental ad but it doesn’t work as well as it should.

The biggest problem is the headline. There’s a lot wrong with it. For starters, the pronoun THEM doesn’t agree (in number) with its apparent antecedent A RENTER. There’s only one renter and the word THEM is plural.

This sort of thing has been going on for a long time but it’s still sloppy. It’s bad, especially in a head, because literate readers stop reading to scratch their own heads.

Normally, the way out would be to recast the sentence. “If renters’ flights are late, wait for them” would have been fine. My brother suggested “When our renters’ flights are late, we wait” and that’d be pretty good. When is stronger than if, anyway.

But there’s an even better way out, although you have to read the sans serif reverse body copy to see it. There was a real renter, a real flight and a real Avis employee who stuck around. Both the renter and the employee were women and they have names.

There could have been two small head shots of the women in a headline that read “Susan Boles’s flight was late. Avis’s Debbie Jones waited for her.”

Real human beings. Imagine that. The body copy, had it been set in a larger and more readable serif font, would have made it clear that this is SOP at Avis. (Odd, though, that only one passenger on that late flight was an Avis customer.)

Kudos to Avis for getting the possessive of Boles right in the body copy. Most of the time, you see a mere apostrophe after a singular noun that ends in s. With rare exceptions, mostly ancient names, it should always be apostrophe s: Lois’s, Avis’s, etc.

Side A says “Drill our own oil, refine it here, dig our own coal, and tap our own natural gas.”

Side B says “we must reduce our dependency on foreign oil” or, if we’re talking about our own oil, “we must reduce our dependency on oil.”

Side B says we must also eliminate coal as an energy source.

Side B’s big idea is alternative or alternate energy sources. That means wind and solar energy mostly, but geothermal and tidal are also on the table. Nuclear energy is unacceptable to Side B and ethanol, mostly from corn, is semi-acceptable.

What would happen if side A just agreed with Side B?

“Yep, you’re right. We gotta stop using coal, oil and natural gas and we can live without nuclear energy, the cheapest, most reliable, most abundant energy source on earth. “

“We accept that we must develop alternative sources of energy exactly as you describe. We’re on board. “

“Now, we don’t expect you to tell us within a decade or two exactly when alternative energy sources will be capable of handling our energy needs. They’re not now, not even if we cover the whole country with solar panels and giant bird-killing windmills. “

“So here’s what we propose: let’s drill our own oil, refine it here, dig our own coal and tap our own natural gas until alternate energy sources can take their place. ”

“Then we can phase in the alternates and phase out the stored solar energy – all that oil, coal and natural gas. How’s that grab you? Let’s get rocking. “

“Oh, and in the meantime, what say we stop burning food?”

No skin off anyone’s nose and we’d be completely and seamlessly energized forever. So now that Side B has a better idea of where Side A stands, the misunderstanding has been resolved.

Right?

Hello, is this working?

Years ago in New York, I got into an interesting battle with Verizon – on purpose, as an experiment.

I was a Verizon customer by accident. I’d started with New York Telephone and the relationship involved no contract at all. Then Bell Atlantic took over NYT and still no contract. Ditto when NYEX took over from Bell Atlantic. Then, finally, my cell phone and I landed in Verizon’s lap. I was a triple legacy.

One night, I foolishly left my briefcase in my car on 39th Street while I dashed up to the office on Madison Avenue to get something I needed. When I came back 10 minutes later, the driver side window had been smashed and my briefcase, with cell phone inside, was gone. I went to an apartment building around the corner on Park Avenue and the doorman let me use his phone. First I called the cops, then called Verizon and told them to cancel my cell phone account right away.

I waited a week to hear from Verizon. Nothing. So I walked over to AT&T to get a new phone.

Verizon sent a bill a month later for the monthly access fee. I wrote back and told them I had cancelled the account.

Every month for three months, they sent a new bill and every month I wrote back and told them I’d cancelled.

A woman from their in-house debt collecting arm called me at the office several times and I told her a) I had cancelled the night my phone was stolen and b) I had written to them several times about that. Her scornful response still rings in my ears: “You should have called.” I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

One day about four and half months after the theft, our receptionist interrupted a meeting with clients to tell me I had an urgent call about my Verizon account. I asked her to put it through to the boardroom phone and asked the clients if they’d mind listening. No, they wouldn’t mind at all, although they were puzzled.

The call was from an outside collection agency. I stopped the caller’s spiel in its tracks to ask for her name and phone number and told her I’d call her right back. I did and asked her to stop talking for a minute and listen carefully. I explained everything that had happened. She then said “But you still have the contractual obligation to pay the monthly access fee.”

“I never had a contract, ever, not even at the start,” I said. “Would you like the name and number of the doorman who heard me tell Verizon to cancel the service?”

She said “No. That’s not necessary. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” Then she paused and I could hear her smile. “You sound like you’re having fun.”

A couple of weeks later I got a letter of apology from a Verizon VP and I never heard from them again.

Verizon should have known that I had no contract with them. Verizon started the whole mess but I let it go on just to see if they’d ever figure it out and I stuck with it because they ignored me, insulted me and made me laugh.

After that, I changed phones a few times but stuck with AT&T. Cingular took them over and then a few years later changed their name to AT&T, which sounds confusing but it’s not. The company is Cingular but they call themselves AT&T now.

Last month AT&T sent a letter to tell me that my phone probably won’t be compatible with their planned network upgrade scheduled to kick in mid-May. So they’d give me a new phone and I’d select a new plan and all I had to do was visit or call.

That “new plan” thing sent up a red flag.

I went to the AT&T store down the street, took a number and waited a few minutes until I realized the employees were basically talking to themselves. I went home and called the 800 number.

The new plan options did not include the Canada segment that I’d had on my phone for years. We have clients in Canada and I could always call them from here or call our office from there and even call to somewhere else in Canada from anywhere in Canada and use only my regular AT&T minutes with no extra charge for “roaming”.

They don’t offer that plan anymore. But Verizon does. I’m back with Verizon. And they gave me a new phone for free. You know, their reception really is better.

My contract with AT&T expired years ago, so maybe they’ll come after me. Who knows? And in another 20 years Verizon might start the whole cycle again and they won’t care. I won’t either but it’ll be fun watching a really big company stumble through its version of customer service yet again.