The Home Despot

Have you ever been walking through the mall and stopped to wonder why anyone would willingly name a clothing store after an unstable country, largely dependent on a limited-resource and ruled over by a corrupt kleptocracy?

Said store.

Did the original founders of the Banana Republic want us to associate their products with the labor of oppressed masses supporting wealthy plutocrats?  Or did they merely want to sell us exotic travel-themed clothing and had already rejected Heart of Darkness as a brand name option?  We may never know.

The horror . . . The horror . . .

A pretty good assumption is that this was the result of the simple equation of horrible things + time = who gives a rat’s ass, and it’s hard not to see examples of it every day if you know where to look. Examples such as . . .

Fictional Greeks

Need to get out the toughest stains?  Reach for Ajax, because he’s stronger than dirt!  Looking for some fine jewelry / free internet radio?  You can always reward your curiosity at Pandora!  Need an appropriate name for your sports team / brand of condoms?  Can’t go wrong with those tough Trojans!

Or you can. Go wrong, that is. Because, dear reader, all of the above figures from Greek Mythology have some seriously screwed up implications attached to them when you think about it.

To begin with, while both of the Greek warriors named Ajax may have been famed for their strength, one of them was also mostly known for the rape he committed during the sack of Troy.  In a temple.  With a priestess.  Who had taken a vow of chastity.  Basically, the guy raped a nun.

Ajax: Stronger Than Nuns

But hey, maybe they mean the other Ajax!  You know, the one who was famous for heroically falling on his own sword due to the fact that he couldn't live with the shame of trying to kill his own comrades when a choice suit of armor was awarded to Odysseus rather than to him.

Granted, the man does look like he could use a pair of pants.

Pandora?  Before she was hawking jewelry or online music, she was unleashing all of the evils in the world on humanity due to her own insatiable curiosity.  Just in case you didn't catch that the first time, there is an actual store that sells jewelry one might ostensibly give as a gift that decided it would be a good idea to name itself after a figure best known for giving mankind the gift that keeps on giving: Horrific misery.

"A lifetime of suffering? Oh, honey, how did you know?"

And the Trojans?  Well, first you might want to reflect on the fact that they were on the losing side of the fictional war they were fighting in, after the enemy snuck into their city while hiding inside of a giant wooden horse that they were stupid enough to accept at face value.  That’s bad enough of an image for a sports team, but for a condom company?  Let's just say there's a reason we also name malicious computer viruses after mythological wooden horses . . .

Trojan Condoms: They’ll Never See You Coming.

And then there's the . . .

Actual Greeks

Given the somewhat recent popularity of the film 300, modern culture tends to view the Spartans as a bunch of bad-ass macho men who fought for democracy and could kill their foes with their abs.

"TONIGHT, WE DINE AT CHILI'S!"

The reality?  Well, yes, they were considered to be a fearsome force to face on the battlefield, and records of their methods of training would make members of the French Foreign Legion feel like they got off easy by comparison . . . But they were also slave owning pederasts who threw babies into chasms if they deemed them to be weak. That might make them a good candidate as mascots for a particularly twisted branch of NAMBLA (the North American Man / Boy Love Association), but it does make you wonder why so many hyper-masculine Sport Teams are eager to associate themselves with them.

"Good game." "Yes, good game."

Believing that the Spartans were a force that defended human freedom is tantamount to being under the impression that the Southern Confederacy was fighting for exactly the same reason during The American Civil War. The Spartans entire way of life was both supported and created by their enslavement of their own neighbors, the Messenians, who labored in the fields in order to free up the Spartans for a lifetime of harsh military training. Training that was only necessary due to the fact that they had to cow a population that outnumbered themselves three to one. Consider the fact that, in reality, the 300 Spartans that fell to the Persian army were in the company of 600 of their slaves, who had been brought along to help groom and armor their masters. The film might as well have been called 900.

"Is anyone else smelling a gritty reboot? Guys?"

And, like many ancient Greek cultures, the Spartans considered pederasty (a homosexual relationship between an adult male and a pubescent or adolescent male) to be the highest form of love. Much like the Sacred Band of Thebes, a fighting force made up entirely of paired lovers, the Spartans reasoned that accepting homosexuality within the same fighting unit would increase morale, esprit de corps, and ensure (ahem) a tight phalanx.

"Have you ever considered a career in the military?"

And let's not forget that they practiced what can only be called the World's first well documented Eugenics program. Seriously, this one alone should be more than enough reason to give any organization pause. The Spartans: People from the past that seem like they've stepped out of a science fiction novel? Yes.  People we should emulate and name kid's sports organizations after?  Probably not.

"Faster, dammit! The last ten kids to finish the race get thrown into the chasm!"

Speaking of terrible people . . .

Pirates

Ah, pirates. Those lovable, murderous, Spam-loving, pillaging rapists that fill our hearts with glee. Whether you are trying to make people laugh in the Sunday paper, or are hoping to win the Super Bowl, you can't go wrong with nautical brigands.

"Look at me. I'm the captain now."

Now, granted, most members of professional football teams with names like Buccaneers, Raiders, Vikings, etc. tend to leave out the pillaging aspect of the trade, but imagine if their mascots were not the cartoon variety of pirate and were in fact the AK-47 toting variety and the whole concept gets a lot less cute.

"'Ello, Poppet."

And it's not like the historical pirates were any better than their modern day counterparts. If anything, they were worse. After all, you generally don't hear current accounts of Somali pirates landing in, say, India, sacking temples, killing and raping indiscriminatly, and then returning home to brag about it around the hearth. In fact, actual casualties in modern piracy are laughably low by comparison, with most of the deaths caused by over zealous security personnel overestimating the strength of their attackers. That's right, most of the deaths caused by modern piracy are those of the pirates themselves.

"Amateurs."

But, I guess I can understand wanting to be feared, especially when you're trying to promote a luxury cruise service that revisits many of the former sites of piratical atrocities.

Is it true that if you upgrade to the Explorer Suite, you get to shoot a guy in the face with Laura Linney?

And while we're on the subject of atrocities . . .

Native Americans

Before I get into this, I want to make it absolutely clear that I have nothing against the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Most of them, at any rate.

And, I will admit, that of all of these categories, this is the one that has gained the most national attention as being potentially disrespectful when organizations, particularly sports teams, have names like The Chiefs, The Redskins, and The Braves. I suppose part of me can almost believe the explanation that team names derived from indigenous peoples are meant to respect the bravery and skill of said people . . . though the fact that more than a few of them are called The Savages does kind of put a damper on that argument. Whatever the case may be, I thought I'd touch on another subject: The use of Native Americans in advertising.

"Nothings says quality like a race that we legitimately tried to wipe off the face of the planet. Now with Easy-Measure Lid!"

I mean, does anyone else find it more than a little macabre that so many everyday items utilize images of Native Americans as part of their packaging?  Is there another part of the world where the systematic depopulation of a continent was followed up by the people at least tangentially responsible for said depopulation slapping depictions of the victims onto packets of butter?  And then folding said packets so that it looks like we can see their boobs?

I'm guessing no.

There's been plenty of genocides over the course of human history, but I honestly can't think of another one so massive in scale and successful in practice that the descendants of the perpetrators could actually feel sentimental about its victims centuries later. And, even if you aren't distantly related to someone who was in some part responsible for the mass murder, rape, and enslavement of the original inhabitants of the country you live in, you still have to admit that it's more than a little weird. Imagine if, years after the Rwandan genocide, you could buy soft drinks or cigarettes with images of smiling, noble looking Tutsis on them? In Rwanda.

"Tutsi Brand: Helping you to relax after a long day of piling human skulls."

But even that kind of pales in comparison to . . .

The Devil

Are you trying to market your booze?  Hot tobassco sauce?  A delicious blend of orange juice, milk, sugar, ice, and vanilla? Do you want to infer that your brand of vacuum cleaner is capable of possession?  Do you need to let people know that the eggs they are about to eat are going to be zesty?

What rough hors d'oeuvre, it's hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be eaten at a family picnic?

If your answer was yes to any of the above, feel free to adhere the image of Satan, the Prince of Darkness onto your canned meat spread and start watching the dollars roll in.

Behold, the sandwich of the Great Deceiver.

Listen, we all know that using the devil as a mascot has become pretty common place by now, to the point that no one bats an eye at the practice, but this is the fucking Devil we’re talking about, one of the most recognized symbols of evil in the entire world. There isn't a major religion on the planet that doesn't have some sort of concept of a demonic figure who personifies all of the negative aspects of the human condition. And it really hasn't been all that long since being accused of being associated with the guy could get you burned at the stake, hanged, or, at the very least, imprisoned. Did you know that in 1944, Helen Duncan became the last person to be imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735? Yes, you read that right. Nineteen forty four.

A woman who was clearly in league with Lucifer.

The crazy thing is, people started using the Devil as a mascot long before people stopped generally believing that the Devil was a real thing that we should be horribly afraid of. Hell (pun intended), there are still plenty of people who believe that the Devil is a real force of evil in the world, and yet here the guy is, grinning at us like he's just this lovable scamp up to his old tricks.

This stuff pairs well with scrambled eggs! Hail Satan!

I mean, really, imagine traveling a hundred years into the future and finding out that Joseph Stalin, a man whose regime can be linked to the deaths of up to 50 million human lives (and that's not including the casualties of the second World War), has somehow managed to become a cutesy mascot that gets slapped onto things in order to communicate that the product is tough.

50 Million Human Lives Snuffed Out Tough

I mean, we might as well just start having Hitler peddle anti-stress tea.

Oh, wait.  That already happened . . .

2 + 2 = 5 (No Rat / Face Cage Necessary)

About five years ago, I found out about a learning disability called Dyscalculia, which in some ways resembles Dyslexia, except that instead of being a developmental reading disorder, it makes it incredibly difficult for a person who has it to comprehend arithmetic, math facts, and anything to do with numbers in general, along with some fun “bonus” issues (we’ll get to them later.) After reading about it for less than five minutes, I not only realized that I clearly had it, but felt a massive amount of relief finally knowing that this thing I’d been suffering from since I was a child was an actual thing, and not just me being an idiot.  It had always struck me as odd that I could somehow be able to score perfectly on a SAT or GRE verbal exam, but score abysmally low when it came to the other half of what is generally accepted to be the basic measure of human intelligence.

To give you a good idea of what living with Dyscalculia is like, let me start by asking you a question. What is the bigger number: 4 or 7? Did you have to take a moment to look at both numbers and decide? And in the moment did you have to carefully think about whether or not what you were looking at was a 4, a 7, 74, or 47? Now let’s up the ante. What is 4 plus 7? Did you have to use your fingers to get the result or was it faster to do the work in your head, or did you use a shortcut you invented where you counted the four points of the numeral 4 and counted up from 7? Was it much harder for you to do because one of the numbers wasn’t an even number? Did you have to check yourself several times just to make sure the answer is correct, because this wouldn’t be the first time you incorrectly did simple introductory math. If you said yes to all of the above, and you are not in kindergarten, congratulations, you probably have Dyscalculia! You too can live the dream of being ridiculed by an eight year old for counting on your fingers.

You see, the basic problem is that when you ask me to picture the number four, all I see inside my head is a number 4. What I don’t see is the concept of four. I can recognize numbers, and I’ve learned to recognize that 47 is a larger number than 4, but that’s only because I know that there are two numbers in 47, and two is bigger than one. And all of that after making sure that I’m not looking at all the possible combinations of the numbers 4, 7, and 4. Point is, even the most rudimentary math takes me a lot more time to accomplish than, well, literally everyone who doesn’t have Dyscalculia. And it gets worse. Addition and subtraction is one thing, but multiplication? That’s practically algebra for me. Division? If I didn’t have a calculator I promise you that I would never be able to figure it out. It might as well be magic.

As you can imagine, having this learning disability made school hell for me. Once it became clear that my math skills were practically non-existent, and my verbal and reading skills were superb (to paint a picture, I read the Hobbit for the first time when I was six), the conclusion reached by all but one of my teachers from fifth grade on was that I was A: An idiot, or B: Lazy. Which is frustrating when you have to put so much time into figuring out basic math. I was trying, trying five times as hard to finish my math homework after breezing through the liberal arts subjects, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done. The only reason that one teacher (bless his non-judgmental heart) saw past this was because he regularly had me in summer school, where he saw first hand that if I had enough time, I could always reach the right answer. I think he must have suspected something was up because he would also give me partial credit for answers where I had transposed the numbers.

Tests were the worst. I would sit there, looking at the page, trying to make sense of it all, knowing that I was being timed, knowing I was going to fail because it would take me ten minutes to get through a single question and get a right answer on a test with thirty questions. Oh, and make certain to show your work! Having to fake that compounded the problem. And I had to fake it, because showing my work would essentially be me writing down the numerical equivalent of the All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy bit from The Shining.

And remember me mentioning being timed? Imagine wasting even more time while being tested due to one of the fun side effects of Dyscalculia: Difficulty gauging the passage of time. As an adult I am constantly checking my phone or a nearby clock to make certain I’m not running late, and I often show up for work or social events fifteen to thirty minutes early because I hate showing up late (a coping mechanism I had to learn to survive in academia.) And that goes hand in hand with any kind of estimation of size and distance as well. How big is it? I don’t know. How far? No idea. Close and far are about as sophisticated as it’s ever going to get with me.

Once I was finally out of the public school system, my academic life immediately went from being a shaky C level student to a 4.0, Dean’s List member. It was surreal. I found myself finally having all the time in the world to fully commit to working on homework that had absolutely nothing to do with arithmetic, and realized that without that extra burden of having to comprehend math, I was a mental powerhouse when it came to reading, writing, and analyzing information.

I thought my troubles were over. I was wrong.

Because you see, there’s life after college. And if you’re someone with a liberal arts degree when the economy takes a nose-dive, you’re quickly going to realize that there are certain jobs that are next to impossible to perform without access to basic arithmetic. I once, briefly, worked as a cashier at a calendar kiosk, and that went about as well as you can imagine it did. One of the managers actually thought I was stealing from the till, probably because I was handing people more money back than they had given me. It didn’t help that one of them informed me that I was being timed every time I opened the cashier.  After less than two weeks one of the managers passive aggressively rescheduled my shift in order to make me late for work (did I mention I hate being late?) and I quit on the spot. Which I imagine was exactly what they wanted.

Dyscalculia also features the major side “benefit” of sufferers having low latent inhibition. If you don’t have time to look that up, it’s basically the tendency to be easily over stimulated by sounds, color, etc. In my particular case, I cannot tolerate loud noise, particularly when it’s artificially being created by speakers or sub woofers.  Imagine not being able to attend a live concert without feeling like a shrill drill instructor is howling directly into your eardrums. I’ve had to flee numerous social occasions because a band has started playing. One incident ended with me screaming at the top of my lungs and abandoning a restaurant I had been waiting two hours to get into (and I’d already ordered.) I cannot tell you how many fire alarms I have literally smashed into pieces to get them to stop shrieking at me. Yes, I could have removed the batteries, but you see that would have taken too much time. It’s that bad.

And, of course, humans being what they are (delicious), few people will believe you when you try to explain the problem to them. I’ve told people I have a numerical learning disability (I naturally assume most people haven’t heard of Dyscalculia) and their response is usually: “No you don’t, you fucking dirty liar.” I can go as far as pointing them to the Wikipedia page describing the condition, and they’ll still pull the whole “Well, anyone can edit that, you know, so it must not be true.” I swear I could have the surgeon general tell these people that I’m not lying and they would probably conclude that I had hired an actor and dressed him up as Boris D. Lushniak.

The slightly kinder, stupidly well-intentioned response is, of course, “Well, I’m certain you’ll get better if you work at it.” Yes, technically, that statement is true. I have, in fact, spent a lifetime coming up with shortcuts and habits that make me seem as adept at math as a canny first grader. But, for all intents and purposes, my skills at arithmetic will always hover around there. Yes, with great effort I can solve complex equations. I’ve done it. The thing is, the knowledge of how to solve a complex equation doesn’t stick. I don’t forget the knowledge because I’m not using it, I forget the knowledge because I never really knew it in the first place. I can’t memorize numbers because I can’t even freaking see them inside my head. But I can memorize mnemonics, songs, the names of people (real and imaginary) and use those things to stand in for proofs, formulas, and numerical sequences. Unfortunately, that kind of complex memorized knowledge doesn’t stick around forever, the same way an actor will gradually be unable to remember the lines of a play he hasn’t been in for six months.

Somewhere, the noble native American chief Sohcahtoa cries a solitary tear.

So if you know someone who, like me, shows up 45 minutes early because someone told them that it was 15 to 5, and they were worried that they would be late for a 5:30 appointment, and thought that they had been informed that it was 5:15, please, go easy on them. It’s tough to be outsmarted by 8 year olds when you’re 36.