Ugly American Takes the Tube

I saw this ad in the underground today: "Marmite Crisps. You'll love them or you'll hate them."

This is an example of what feels so wrong about England: Phlegmatic advertising. It is something you just don't see in America. Advertisers don't say, "Coke! You might be ambivalent!" Or "Southwest Airlines -- some people like this sort of thing."

Americans like to be presented with boldness, brashness, exuberant, irrational confidence. American advertisers speak exclusively in excited mode. Yes, occasionally, there are products -- foreign products like, say, Altoids -- whose ambiguous come-ons feel novel to us. And while we may embrace the product, we impute to its maker suspicious qualities: They are coy, sly, probably dirty. It's the Puritan in us.

Now, Russia, for instance, takes a different tack. In Russia everything is named prescriptively. Products and signs translate like this: Chocolate for Children; Juice for Health; Eat Fast. This is uncomfortable in the other direction -- it goes against an American's independent grain to have our purchases be instructional. We would simply never buy a thing that told us we had to, whether we had to or not. I vividly recall standing in front of a Moscow grocery shelf that was issuing orders at me in this silent fashion and wanting to yell, Mind your own goddamn business, you Huns! I'll use it to shine my shoes if I feel like it!

This was a sane response to my mind, authoritarianism begging resistance in all forms.

England, though . . . English subways say things like "Mind the gap" instead of "Watch your step!" What kind of milquetoast would pay attention to such a thing, we wonder? "Mind the gap," indeed. The only red-blooded response is a pitying sneer. Really? 'Mind the gap'? Perhaps I would if I were 4!

What's with all the diffidence? Really, they virtually begged for the Revolution. No self-respecting person could be ruled by a nation so suicidally prone to deference.