I was once, long ago, angry at the Advertiser. Then after going through a two semesters of advertising and marketing classes I shifted my anger (and rightly so) to the Marketing Man.

You can spin it so many ways. You can say that what he really does is a service because he's making sure the goods you need are targeted to you. True. But it doesn't change the fact that his core assumptions are that you are a primarily selfish bag of drives and motivations; that you can and must be coddled and handled so that you can secrete money.

I've always found it ludicrous when the Marketing Man argues that it is really the market's choice that damns them, when it is the Marketing Man who controls the information on which that selfsame market bases their choices. Marketing Genius won't accept partial responsibility for our skewed sense of physical beauty, for example, but he will be paid handsomely to help perpetuate the same skewed sense of physical attractiveness. Why would he be paid so much if what he's doing doesn't affect the choices people make?

Blame is generously sprinkled on Big Business for its part in perpetuating this cycle of avarice. Because it's big, it deals in masses, forgets that those numbers in the sales figures are real people. If you want to find a reason why the Marketing Man considers you nothing more than a collection of selfish drives to coddle, look no further than here.

In the end the real onus lies with our own greed, our own fears. If we didn't need to be so beautiful all the time there would be no handles with which Big Business and Big Marketing can pull us. We'd buy shampoo simply because it cleaned our hair.