Here's a humor piece currently appearing on Beliefnet. For those of you
interested in the writey biz I'll have a few comments about the writing and
editing process at the end.
***
General Mills
Minneapolis, MN
Your Excellency:
I am writing in regards to your food product, Cheerios. Actually not the
Cheerios themselves, which look fine as far as I can tell, but the box.
Whatever possessed you to start putting inspirational sayings on the top of
the boxes?
A few weeks ago I took a new box of Cheerios from the kitchen cabinet, and as
I opened it I saw this printed across the top flap:
"Trust your instincts. You know more than you think you do."
Now, Your Eminence, I've never been in the military, and I'm not even sure
how to address a General. But I was still pretty surprised at the sentiment.
Army life must not be at all like I pictured.
What bothered me most, I think, was that this advice is so vague. It's the
kind of thing I expect to get from a box of tea. I don't mind having tea
whisper sweet nothings, because tea is, after all, a style food. But
breakfast cereal is a substance food, and if it's going to give advice, it
should be substantial advice. Like "Change your oil every 3000 miles," or
"Hey, everybody, let's floss!"
Besides, this advice isn't all that good, is it? Some people know *less* than
they think they do–boy, you meet ‘em every day. When they trust their
instincts they can get in big trouble. When you see a guy walking around with
a black eye, he probably followed his instincts. Personally, I trusted my
instincts once, and everybody said "What did you do to your hair?" for weeks.
Wouldn't, "Let's think things through" or "Consider the consequences" be
better advice?
Well, today I went to the store and was unsettled to see that I now have a
choice of special messages from Cheerios. The smaller-size boxes read, "Once
your consciousness has been raised, it cannot be lowered."
Your Worship, can I ask you a personal question? Just how old are you,
anyway? Because, I gotta tell you, I haven't heard anyone refer to
consciousness-raising for about twenty-five years. I know, I led a
consciousness-raising group back then. But I was just a college student, and
you must have already been a rear admiral or something, because I'm still
young enough to know that the phrase has gone the way of "Aquarian."
I don't know why these messages make me feel kind of irritated–a better word
might be pestered. I feel surrounded by enough of these vague feel-good
sentiments already, on shoe boxes and pharmaceutical ads and inserts that
come with the phone bill. They all have in common a self-congratulatory,
condescending quality, but they achieve this superior height by being
weightless. It's like Yoda on helium. Dozens of words like "gentle," "earth,"
"free," "caring," and "self" are floating in the atmosphere, colliding and
forming random alliances, then bombarding us from every direction. I feel
like I'm living in a box of fortune cookies.
The net effect of all this earnest, ersatz wisdom is like spending a dinner
party next to a person who believes that she is whitening her teeth through
hypnosis. That's fine, but please, please, I'll do anything, I'll even let
you have my raspberry sorbet if you will just please stop talking about it.
My suggestion, Your Honor, would be that you switch to a plain, factual
message like "OK, time to eat some more Cheerios," and leave it at that.
That's your area of expertise, after all, and putting it right on top of the
box has a baldfaced quality suitable to a grizzled old veteran like yourself.
You might call it "supraliminal" advertising. I've had it with coyness, with
vacuous earnestness, with murmuring pieties that flap their eyelashes across
the kitchen table. Just say "Cheerios, it's what's for breakfast" and let me
figure out the meaning of life on my own time.
Signing off, Sir. Going to enjoy a bowl of nice non-commital corn flakes.
***
When I wrote this piece I was really unsure whether the "General" theme
worked. I thought maybe it felt like it came from an entirely different
essay, and didn't really blend in, and perhaps it was tired as well--I had
the feeling I'd run across it before in something on the order of Mad
Magazine. And maybe it just wasn't funny.
The only reason I didn't rewrite to remove it is that I had fallen in love
with the line, "Army life must not be at all like I pictured." I just got
such a kick out of that line that I couldn't bear to sacrifice the "General"
theme that enabled it, even though I suspected that theme was kind of an
encumbrance. Someone once told me that a writer must edit himself ruthlessly,
"you have to murder your darlings." But I couldn't ditch that "darling."
I turned in this piece just a few weeks before Sept 11, so that made it
utterly unusable for awhile. Then an editor took a good look at it and said,
"I don't see any way we can make this work." I think she meant that it just
didn't grab her, and I thought, "Hmmm, maybe it just wasn't very good." But
another couple of editors saw it, and they liked it, so no accounting for
taste. *Then* the war in Afghanistan began, and the "General" theme suddenly
seemed tactless. An editor wrote me asking me to remove it for that reason,
but I never received his email--my AOL has been acting up since November, and
some email just never arrives. So I did nothing with it, and last week I
heard from the same editor saying they would run it as is, without the change
-- a change request I'd never heard.
I'm still not sure the General theme works, but this editor at least liked it
a great deal. Overall I think this piece improves as it goes along. It kind
of goes in circles at first, but by the time we reach "I don't know why these
messages make me feel" it seems to have found its footing and to actually be
going somewhere interesting.
I did delete a paragraph that I liked, but that every time I reread it, it
stuck out. It was about a related feeling of annoyance I have with women's
magazines--a similar feeling of being condescended to by a voice that
purports to be knowing and wise. I said that I stopped subscribing to womens'
mags because I got fed up with things being described as "funny and wise."
Books, movies, songs, people, everything was "funny and wise." I wrote, "If I
want funny and wise, I'll read Dostoevsky in the kiddie pool." It was a good,
punchy, curmudgeonly graf, but in terms of subject matter a long way of from
breakfast cereals.
I have to give credit to my son Stephen who was in the kitchen when I
encountered the Cheerios boxtop, and heard my annoyance, and helped me focus
with the comment about "it would be OK on a box of tea, tea is a style food
and cereal is a substance food." Steve will be 20 next week, yay! I'll be all
through with teenagers, yay!
On another note: I considered adding a line at the top of this post saying,
"There's something in this column that I had reservations about. Can you
guess what it is? The answer is below." But (laughing out loud now) I did
that with a column a year ago. THe "run-over pocketbook" column. I put in the
top that there was one turn of phrase that gave me fits, and I never was sure
I got it right, could the readers guess which it was? Well, I got a whole
*lot* of nominations of phrases that didn't work! People had all kinds of
ideas about things in that column that were just ineffective! Ouch and LOL!
********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
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