Impress your friends with your illiterate kitsch
Posted on 05. May, 2009 by rents in Win/Fail | 1 Comment
There’s a commercial popping up on cable lately, something for a fancily-bound set of classic books like Huckleberry Finn and Three Musketeers. Stuff you should have read before college if you’re any sort of decent English-speaker.
According to the commercial, once you purchase the whole series your home will be transformed into a stereotypical white middle-class library complete with fireplace, grateful children, and smiling wife who is releaved that you didn’t get the penis enlargement pills instead.
Also, as an added bonus, nobody will be permitted into your house without a sweater and tidy haircut.
Impress your friends, the commercial insists. Which begs the question, what sort of illiterate friends do you have who can be impressed by overpriced, ostentacious, gilded copies of the banal standards, and perhaps more interestingly why are you concerned with impressing these people.
It’s a scam for the shallow, to make it easier for them to impress their shallow friends. There’s no connection with the books: they’re just something that got sent to you in the mail. You didn’t pick them personally because you thought they would be interesting or thought-provoking: you just wanted a corporation to dress up your house with what it thinks you should pretend to read.
I have more respect for people whose house is littered with romance novels: at least I know they really put some thought into picking them out and cared enough to read them.
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Excellent. I'm watching this infomercial right now and laughing!