Today’s Morning Intelligence Brief from the geopolitical news service Stratfor (subscription-only; well worth it) offered this tidbit about how Palestinian militant group Hamas is trying to establish its legitimacy as a political party:

Hamas has arrested the spokesman for the Army of Islam, the group that is holding British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent Alan Johnston in Gaza, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Monday. The arrest comes exactly two weeks after Hamas publicly announced that it would free Johnston from his jihadist captors “using all means necessary.”

Hamas’ recent actions are part of its Gaza leadership’s strategy to illustrate the group’s political legitimacy in the wake of its June 15 takeover in Gaza. This also explains why Hamas recently killed off the infamous Mickey Mouse look-alike character that urged Palestinian children to kill Israelis in a children’s TV show aired on a Hamas-owned station. After getting serious flack for using a Western Disney character to promote jihad, the producers at the station had the character beaten to death in the show’s final episode by a character posing as an Israeli.

Two items from the Wall Street Journal made me think about how bizarrely commodified our intimate lives have become. Alexandra Alter reports (“The Baby-Name Business“, June 22) on the latest service providers to capitalize on parental anxiety: consultants who, for a fee, will help you name your baby:

Sociologists and name researchers say they are seeing unprecedented levels of angst among parents trying to choose names for their children. As family names and old religious standbys continue to lose favor, parents are spending more time and money on the issue and are increasingly turning to strangers for help.

Some parents are checking Social Security data to make sure their choices aren’t too trendy, while others are fussing over every consonant like corporate branding experts. They’re also pulling ideas from books, Web sites and software programs, and in some cases, hiring professional baby-name consultants who use mathematical formulas….

The chief reason for the paralysis is too much information. About 80 baby-name books have been published in the last three years, according to Bowker, a publishing database — compared with just 50 such titles between 1990 and 1996. More than 100 specialty Web sites have popped up offering everything from searchable databases and online snap polls to private consultations.

One site, BabyNames.com, says it draws about 1.2 million unique visitors a month, a 50% increase in five years — and 3,000 people have used its customized naming service, which provides 12 names for $35. Just this month, the site began offering half-hour phone consulting sessions for $95. “It’s so overwhelming, it’s hard to know where to start,” says Patricia Martin of Williston, Vt., who is expecting a baby in September….

[T]he growing brand consciousness among consumers has made parents more aware of how names can shape perceptions. The result: a child’s name has become an emblem of individual taste more than a reflection of family traditions or cultural values. “We live in a marketing-oriented society,” says Bruce Lansky, a former advertising executive and author of eight books on baby names, including “100,000 + Baby Names.” “People who understand branding know that when you pick the right name, you’re giving your child a head start.”

…Even parents who are professional name consultants say the decision can be wrenching. As one of the founders of Catchword, a corporate naming firm with offices in New York and Oakland, Calif., Burt Alper says he and his wife, Jennifer, who also works in marketing, felt “tons of pressure” to come up with something grabby.

Although Mr. Alper typically gives clients a list of 2,000 names to mull over, he says he kept the list of baby names to 500, for simplicity. In the end, they named their daughter Sheridan, a family name Mr. Alper liked because of its “nice crisp syllables.” They chose Beckett for their six-month-old son, a name the Alpers thought sounded reliable and stable.

“That C-K sound is very well regarded in corporate circles,” Mr. Alper says, giving Kodak and Coca-Cola as examples. “The hard stop forces you to accentuate the syllable in a way that draws attention to it.”

Name choices have long been agonizing for some parents. In Colonial times, it was not uncommon for parents to open the Bible and select a word at random — a practice that created such gems as Notwithstanding Griswold and Maybe Barnes. In some countries, name choices are regulated by the government. France passed a law in the early 1800s that prohibited all names except those on a preapproved list; the last of these laws was repealed in 1993. In Germany, the government still bans invented names and names that don’t clearly designate a child’s sex. Sweden and Denmark forbid names that officials think might subject a child to ridicule. Swedish authorities have rejected such names as Veranda, Ikea and Metallica.

Some favorites from the CNN Money annual list of business blunders for 2006:

#16: Rising Sun Anger Release Bar

At this new watering hole in Nanjing, China, “patrons are invited to rant, curse, smash drinking glasses, and even beat workers equipped with protective gear and dressed as the target of their wrath.”

#33: Heart Attack Grill

A fine example of truth in advertising, this restaurant in Tempe, AZ offers the Quadruple Bypass Burger, “featuring 2 pounds of beef, four layers of cheese, 12 slices of bacon, and 8,000 calories.” (For those of you on a diet, the Triple Bypass is also available.)

#34: Meatcoats

Continuing the wasteful-meats theme, Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art staged an exhibit by Belgian artist Jan Fabre in which all the items were made out of meat, such as a (rather stylish, actually) coat made from raw beefsteak.

#39: Putting the Gross in GDP

Greece revises its GDP upward by 25%, thanks to a bookkeeping change that “adds in the nation’s robust black-market industries such as prostitution and money laundering.” But the joke’s on them as they lose $600 million in European Union aid for poorer nations.

#51: Manual Stimulation at Honda

“Owner’s manuals in more than a million Honda vehicles list a toll-free number to help drivers reach the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Unfortunately, Honda incorrectly prints the area code as 800 rather than 888, leading callers to a recorded message in which a woman’s sultry voice encourages them to ‘call 1-800-918-TALK for just 99 cents per minute.'”
 
#64: Please Don’t Eat the Dragons

The Powys County Council in Wales ordered Black Mountains Smokery to change the name of its Welsh Dragon Sausages because they do not, in fact, contain dragon meat.

#69: Santa’s Got to Go

Britain’s Royal Mail releases a Christmas stamp that looks like Santa defecating into a chimney. The Church of England protests the stamp as insufficiently religious — perhaps they’d prefer baby Jesus getting his diaper changed?

And my personal favorite:

#99: Kiddie Stripper Pole

“‘Unleash the sex kitten inside … soon you’ll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars.’ – From a product listing by $75 billion British retailer Tesco, plugging the $100 Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit – which includes an 8.5-foot chrome pole, a ‘sexy dance garter,’ and play money for stuffing into said garter – in the Toys & Games section of its website. After complaints from parent groups, Tesco decides to keep selling the item as a ‘fitness accessory’ but agrees to remove the listing from the toy section.”

The other night I rented the film Idiocracy, a satire by Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge that appeared in theaters last year for about two seconds, probably because its critique of the mass media hits too close to home. It’s about an average guy who awakens from a government cryogenics experiment to discover that in the year 2505, the human race has become unutterably stupid because all the educated yuppies stopped having babies while the trailer-trash and ghetto gangstas bred like rabbits.

The humans of the future water their crops with Gatorade because advertisers have told them that water is only for toilets. Television now only has two channels, the Violence Channel (featuring the hit show “Ow! My Balls!”) and the Masturbation Channel. Porn is everywhere (Starbucks offers a “Gentleman’s full-body latte”). If this doesn’t sound too different from today, well, you can understand why the entertainment industry gave this film minimal promotion.

Most Hollywood movies that use broader social/cultural problems as the backdrop for their characters’ storyline are written as if the resolution of the individual conflict means that the systemic problem has also gone away. Think of all the Cinderella stories about one talented individual’s escape from the ghetto (e.g. Good Will Hunting), the endless crop of heroic-teacher movies (Coach Carter, Freedom Writers) or the environmentalist critique of suburbia in the nearly-brilliant Over the Hedge. Idiocracy rejects this individualist escapism, another reason it was less popular than its wit deserved. The two unfrozen people from 2005 may make things better for their cretinous brethren in the short-term, but their three children don’t stand a chance against their idiot buddy’s thirty-two. The gene pool is still doomed.

I do think this film is worth seeing, but I also found its worldview troubling in some ways. I’m sure its creators took pains to avoid seeming too racist (the ratio of morons is about 70% hillbilly to 30% ghetto). My beef with the film is that decadence isn’t only an IQ issue, it’s a values issue. Are the lower classes stupider, or do they simply have fewer resources to shield them from the effects of society-wide pathologies? The non-breeding elites, after all, own the media companies that brought us gangsta rap and Geraldo. They become lawyers for the porn industry or write memos telling our president how to evade the Geneva Convention. Being “smart” doesn’t make them wise. The elites can distract themselves from their despair by hoarding more stuff; the poor throw bricks through their own windows.

I’ll leave the last word to the inestimable Garret Keizer, from his book Help: The Original Human Dilemma:

Conservative sociologists and the spawn of conservative think tanks speak of “the culture of poverty.”…What, pray tell, is a culture of poverty? I would guess that it is one of waste, ignorance, substance abuse, petty squabbling, random violence, sexual irresponsibility, shabby child rearing, and a sweet tooth for scandal. I would guess it is a culture with no meaningful conception of the future and no ability whatsoever to know the proper value of anything….

In short, I assume that a culture of poverty would look exactly like the dominant culture of America, which more and more resembles that of a tenement or a trailer park. Lu Ann called Peggy Sue a slut. Monica gave Billy a blow job. The poor are with us always because the poor are us….

I grew up during the building boom in housing projects. We had simultaneously declared war on poverty in America and war on the peasantry in Vietnam. I can remember overhearing the barber shop diatribes on what “those people” down in the city had done, how the spendthrift federal government had moved them out of the slums into brand-new apartments where they lost no time yanking out the faucets and the doorknobs and anything else they could pry loose to sell, probably to get money for liquor and dope. You could not help people like that.

Thus I was taught that a culture of poverty is one in which you trash a place that isn’t even yours and sell whatever you can for a quick buck. In other words, you behave like a coal company in Kentucky. Or like the present administration wants to behave in Alaska. When Republicans say that theirs is the true party of the disadvantaged, I have no trouble keeping a straight face. (pp.204-05)