Moral Scrip

The New York Times -- and not even the Style Section -- has started reporting on coupon-clippers, a subject formerly the domain of Wife Swap and USA Today. These articles always have a strongly moralistic tone, and never more than in a recession. We hear about Heather Hernandez, who bought $160 worth of groceries for $30, and the implication is obvious: Why aren't you doing this?

"Coupons were not in vogue during our period of gluttonous consumption," but now that our GDP has fallen, the Times is suggesting that this boom in the coupon sector will ease the downturn. Later on, a spokesman for a coupon company suggests that "folks are going back to the basics, trying to live simpler lives," and are expressing this Arcadian simplicity by redeeming coupons.

At no point does the article note that using coupons is not real thrift. Reusing pickle jars, or starting a compost heap is thrifty. Coupons are just loss-leaders, mere marketing devices that stores use to get you inside their doors, where you will hopefully buy merchandise with a higher profit margin. Yes, some people game the system, piling coupon on coupon and cheating the stores out of their profits. And yes, the stores put up with it because the cost of people taking unfair advantage of coupons is outweighed by the customers who use them as intended. But the use of coupons doesn't add anything to the economy, doesn't save anything, and doesn't constitute a decline in "gluttonous consumption". Praising extreme coupon-clippers is exalting people who -- by unfair means -- are making things more expensive for you and me.

Articles about coupon freaks, like the concomitant articles about people who root through the gutters for pennies, manage to channel the normal human desire for thrift into a gigantic free rider problem. The obvious answer to the question of "why don't you do this?" is that if we all did it, the stores wouldn't issue so many coupons, and the mint wouldn't issue so many pennies. Rather than urge us not to be free riders on merchants' goodwill, the Times is pretending coupons are so much moral scrip, redeemable for prudence, diligence, conscientiousness, and ample smugness.

Wikipedia Sentence for Today

"Murad III's mismanagement may have led to early Ottoman defeats in the war, but he sired more than 100 children with 1,200 concubines."

Socks

Our correspondents direct us to Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill, an unpublished and subsequently extirpated video game written in 1993. While the frustrated prospect of seeing "caricatures... of George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon" is galling, what I find really interesting is the cult of Socks the Cat that apparently swept the nation between 1992 and 1995/6.

All presidents have pets, and all presidents' pets are popular, but Socks was something else. Do you know whether Ronald Reagan had a pet? Do you know what George Bush Sr.'s cocker spaniel was named? Do you care? The dog, evidently named Millie, was "featured in an episode of Murphy Brown," (and what an exciting episode that must have been) but otherwise minded her own business.

But for the first few years of Bill Clinton's presidency, it seemed like the only facts anybody knew about him were that he could play the saxophone and that he had a pet cat. Of course, my perspective is skewed from being 8 at the time, and more interested in cats than health insurance reform -- if they could only see me now -- but Wikipedia cannot lie: Socks's cultural references page is more than twice as long as any other pet's.

Even more amusing than the mere fact of a celebrity cat is how quickly he washed up. We can see the Socks the Cat Fan Club on Geocities (a double relic), which was abandoned in 1997, fully twelve years before Socks died in obscurity, and just a few days into Bill Clinton's second term. The Clintons, no doubt aware that the bloom was off the rose, got a puppy shortly afterward, but the magic was gone.

Some might say that people forgot about Socks in Clinton's second term because he provided us with a much more prurient interest, and I'm sure there's something to that. As a culture, we don't usually know much about new presidents, so we tend to seize the most accessible handles, be they saxophones, or a goofy tendency toward mispronunciation, or blackness, and when actual stuff happens, we're quick to drop our earlier preoccupations.

On the other hand, saying that Clinton's sex scandal forced Socks out of the public eye because it was more interesting rather misses the point, and the mystery too: Socks was never interesting at all; he was just an ordinary cat.

Wonkavision

Reuters reports that Cablevision, a major provider of cable in the New York area, is introducing "a service to enable subscribers to interact with commercials by clicking on their remote controls." The article explains at length why advertisers might appreciate this service, but is conspicuously mum on the benefits to consumers -- other than offering a hilariously roundabout way to get free paint.

On the other hand, those of you who live in the New York City media market (um, are there any of you?) will know what I mean when I say that I've been interacting with those Cablevision ads for a while now, chiefly by means of the mute button.

Is Life a Boon?

The New York Times reported yesterday on the death of the oldest person in the world, at age 115. This is a genre I like very much, not because I take any pleasure in the death of old people, but because as a category of news, it is sui generis.

The story "World's Oldest Person Dies" is published about once every six months (they last ran it in January) and unlike normal obituaries, the deceased is almost never interesting for what they have done -- merely what they have not done. Sex, race, achievments, cause of death and even age are adventitious. Consequently, while obviously newsworthy, the articles are almost completely inane. Who else could receive an obituary notice from the Times saying "she worked as a maid... until her retirement?" Most pathetically of all, the lede of this latest obituary mentions how much the deceased liked ice cream.

At the same time, "World's Oldest Person Dies" isn't just an isolated event. Human lifespans are carefully circumscribed -- everyone seems to just poop out at age 115 or so, making this a reliable event where "World's Oldest Lightbulb Burns Out," or "World's Oldest Car Breaks Down" never could be. The very nature of the story means that its recurrence is utterly inevitable, and I find that comforting. Whatever else may happen a hundred years from now, the New York Times will still be lighting the world's oldest fools the way to dusty death.