Ring around the collar!
If you’re under 45, those four words probably draw blanks. But if you’re of a certain vintage, you can hear the jingle in your head right now.
“Ring around the collar … ring around the collar!”
The old television commercial was brilliantly simple. A husband wore a white dress shirt. The collar had a dingy gray ring around it. The announcer practically gasped in horror while America’s homemakers were left wondering whether the neighbors had noticed.
The message was unmistakable: If your husband’s collars looked like that, you were failing at your wifely job.
Looking back, it’s maybe more disturbing than funny. Guilting poor Mom into a product purchase. Maybe hubby simply needed to spend a little more attentive time in the shower.
Madison Avenue wasn’t really selling detergent. It was selling anxiety. It created a problem, magnified it, and then offered a miracle solution that came in a brightly colored box at your neighborhood grocery store.
“Ring around the collar …”
It worked beautifully.
Millions of families bought the detergent. Millions also bought into the guilt. Even now, I check the insides of my shirt collars — and I was just an innocent bystander kid when those ads ran.
Those commercials were part of an era when advertisers convinced us we needed whiter whites, fresher breath, shinier floors and coffee that was “mountain grown” and hand-picked by Juan Valdez. Back then, Juan Valdez was everybody’s best friend. Today, we’d deport him — his mountain-grown beans be damned!
Back on our black-and-white TVs, every week seemed to introduce a new crisis we never knew we had until a smiling spokesman appeared between episodes of “Bonanza” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
As it turns out, Americans have always been remarkably willing to buy solutions to problems someone else first convinced us existed.
Fast-forward a few decades, and the advertising business hasn’t changed nearly as much as we’d like to think.
We’re still creating problems that need solutions.
Now, it’s election season, with just over four months to go.
Oh boy. You know what happens next.
“Ring around the collar …”
Soon our mailboxes will groan under the weight of glossy campaign flyers. Our phones will buzz endlessly with text messages insisting this is “the most important election of our lifetime,” pleading for another $25 contribution before midnight.
Television won’t be a refuge, either. It’s Ground Zero.
For these next few months, the pharmaceutical commercials will blessedly retreat. Briefly, we’ll get a break from, “It may be Alzheimer’s.”
“Ask your doctor if …”
“She’ll like it, too …”
Instead, gird yourself for grainy black-and-white images suggesting the opponent personally canceled Christmas, invented potholes, vacationed with the family dog tied to the station wagon roof (that one actually happened) and may, in fact, be Satan incarnate.
Every election features candidates who are the greatest threat to civilization since the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. If only those asteroids could wipe out our political dinosaurs.
The production values are Hollywood.
The facts … are selectively arranged.
Yet the objective is exactly the same as that old detergent commercial:
Capture your attention. Convince you there’s a problem. Create an emotional response. Then offer the only acceptable solution: “Vote for me.”
“Ring around the collar …”
Except the stain we’ll be collared with won’t be our collars, but our ability to think clearly.
So how do we survive the next four months, sanity intact?
By learning the difference between filtering out … and filtering through.
Filtering out means recognizing that nearly every campaign advertisement has one purpose: persuade you emotionally before you have time to think logically. If your pulse jumps, you’ve been had by a professionally engineered marketing campaign.
Filtering through is something different. It means slowing down just enough to ask a few simple questions.
Who’s paying for this message?
Is there actual evidence behind the claim?
What’s not being mentioned?
Does the ad spend more time attacking an opponent than explaining what its own candidate plans to do?
Most importantly, what do independent sources have to say?
Those questions work just as well for political advertising as they do for diet pills, investment seminars, miracle skin creams, anti-aging supplements and … detergents promising to rescue America’s shirt collars.
Democracy in America has always been noisy. It’s always been rough-and-tumble in these “United” States. Messy and loud is how we roll.
But we’ve made it through every election before this one and we’ll make it through this one, too.
The trick is developing the wisdom to separate information from manipulation, facts from theater and truth from tribalism.
Turns out, good judgment is still the most effective filter ever invented. But unlike ring-around-the-collar detergent, you won’t find it on sale in aisle seven.
The stains left by fear, outrage and manipulation don’t wash out with soap.
Fortunately, clear thinking is still ours for free.
Gary Horton is chairman of the College of the Canyons Foundation board. His “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.
