2006-07-03 - 4:16 a.m.
Strange things irritate me. Just now, for instance, I was on the Number One Big Blue Bus, heading here to the Novel Café, the most charming coffee house in which I have amiably slept through my late 20s and 30s, and I passed this gigantic billboard. The poster showed a gigantic Latina woman, with sensitive brown eyes and ruby red lips, pursed in a motherly smile. In the photograph behind her was a shot of this gargantuan drug store – a Sav-On – its windows glitering, its walls stark white and spotless.
“We’ll always be here!” the ad copy intoned, in gigantic print.
Now, does this idea bother you? I suppose that some worried mothers would read the ad and take it at face value: Whenever their hubbies have a heart attack, or whenever their adorable little ones has a bad cold or a tootheache, Sav On will be there to help with the prescriptions, the bottles of Tylenol, or the anti-biotic.
However, I can’t help but read the ad as being menacing. “We will always be here!” it seems to me the ad says, “We will be here long after you are dead and you are but a dream, forgotten by your nearest and dearest! We are God and you are nothing! Now bow down and worship me, for you are filth of the filth – a mere peasant who has no choice or means of questioning our unassailable authority and power!”
I can’t be the only person who sees this ad and inevitably thinks of a sprawling, monstrous corporation, spreading like a virus, devouring free will and choice. The delightful, family-owned little drug stores, like Pattons on Lincoln or Drug Towne on Seventh, will NOT always be there – but it’s not because of anything they do. They won’t be there because filthy disgusting gigantic corporate Sav-On will inevitably swallow them up, devour them, eat them alive, and crush them.
“The Nazis will always be here!” the poster could say. “The Rulers will always find a way to remain in power! Bow down and obey!”
