The pharmacy tells me, by email, that I should get excited about a 40% discount coupon for eye makeup and perhaps, in a muti-gendered world, I should. Excitement seems to be invoked these days for the most unlikely reasons. Not a day passes without messages from organizations that urge us to be excited about some product or service or charity they are promoting. “We are really excited about our new customer service website,” said one. How can they be? Not only is “customer service website” a triple oxymoron — that is, three mutually contradictory terms in one — but even if it described a genuine customer service there would be no reason to get excited about it. That’s what a service website is supposed to do, just the way a gas pump is expected to pump gas, and we don’t get excited about that. It would be easier to believe the more modest claim that “our new customer service website is not half as bad as some of the others.”
Another variation on the same theme is the unlikely claim that an organization or company is “passionate about” something or other. “We are passionate about quality,” or “share our passion for excellence in baked beans.”
But organizations don’t have feelings of any kind, least of all excitement or passion. It’s nonsense. They know it, and you know it. But it is such pervasive nonsense that sometimes it seems almost normal. We are completely accustomed and even conditioned to absorb emotional overstatement, hyperbole, wildly exaggerated claims and plain lies: the biggest burger, the most effective antacid. It’s as if nobody feels they can sell any product, any idea or indeed any political candidate without turning it into a caricature of itself.
So, in the overheated world of promotion, every product or experience is superior, amazing, perfect, great, incredible and of course exciting. Nothing must be adequate, or good enough. By contrast I used to enjoy a sign glimpsed from the Long Island Rail Road, advertising “The Adequate Rubber Stamp Company.” That’s truth in advertising. All anyone needs from a rubber stamp is adequacy. An exciting rubber stamp would be ridiculous, and possibly dangerous around the office.
Our family car, a modest sedan, is occasionally featured in television commercials, where it is shown zooming in an exciting way over picturesque mountains and flying passionately through remote deserts, to the sound of dramatic music. But I’m happy to say that our car never does anything like that. She just putters back and forth, very calmly, to the library and the hardware store, neither of which provides any excitement at all. When there is music it comes, quietly and soothingly, from public radio.
It’s all about age and maturity, really. Children get excited easily — that’s part of their charm. They can be thrilled by meeting plastic mice in Disneyland, while most adults can take plastic mice in their stride. The default assumption of the advertising industry (and most of the political establishment) is that we are all 5 years old and can be excited by almost anything.
And they are not entirely wrong, because we seem to be addicted to the idea of excitement, however synthetic it is. This is not healthy. Excitement is bad for our blood pressure, bad for our judgement and very bad indeed for our politics. The world may be falling apart, as it has been ever since I was born, and pharmacy discounts may be unrepeatable until next week. But there’s no need to get excited about it.
