Seen on my morning commute to work. The SUV’s owner wrote “HIRE ME. SMU MBA – FINANCE.” followed by his (her?) gmail and phone number, on all three rear windows. The best part is the contrast between “MBA – FINANCE” and a medium usually reserved for highschool Homecoming.

Somehow I doubt slapping “MBA” on the back of your car is going to lead to many job offers.

“Economy” means frugal restrained, which has come to mean “cheap.” Economy class. Economy car. Economy-sized. If you’re “economical,” you’re efficient with your money and focused on reducing expenditures.

So isn’t the phrase “Consumer Economy” a contradiction?

It’s appropriate that Environmentalism finally becomes the target of Internet-driven grassroots efforts. After all, the Internet and Environmentalism were both invented by Al Gore. Right? Right. (Sorry, I’ll leave the decade-old jokes alone for the rest of this post.)

Grassroots efforts to get the local school to switch to new lightbulbs are all well and good, but the activists (and now entrepreneurs) over at Carrotmob combine the momentum of the “Green” movement with social networking savvy. Executive summary: Carrotmob negotiates with local businesses to get “bids” on which will make a bigger commitment to greening their company. Then, members descend on the winner with cash in hand and patronize the store, ideally giving it a hefty boost in profits for the day. The idea is to reward businesses with a mob. Like a carrot on a stick. Get it?

It’s a cute idea. Even more exciting, though, is the way it captures the difference between “going green” and old-school Environmentalism. Earth Day is great, but Americans were never really able to separate Environmentalism from dirty vegetarian hippies who want only to ruin your fun. Or something.

The new movement (or fad, depending on who you talk to) combines Environmentalism with the most powerful force in America: consumerism.

We’ve seen this work for other charities – just look at the Product (RED) line. Buying an iPod is fun. Even buying a new toaster is fun. When we get some new item, it releases all sorts of endorphines to give us a rush of pleasure – a trick thought to have played a role in our evolution.*

We also get a rush of hormones when we do something seen as beneficial to others. Businesses fall all over themselves to get a pink ribbon on the front of their box. Fair trade coffee costs more. Recycled paper, too. Marketers know that if they can make you proud to buy their product, you’ll love it.

Status symbols play into this as well, as seen in hybrid cars that sell better when they have the word “hybrid” on the side, as opposed to when they look like all the other unenlightened vehicles.

Consumerism drives everything in our country. Money talks – and that’s the reason why “going green” is taking off. Just ask IBM’s ad writers:

Green is simultaneously a status symbol and a “good cause” that lets people feel proud of themselves. Combine that with our lust for new stuff, and you get a powerful carrot. And a mob.

Good luck, guys.

Sidenote: Eric Janszen believes alternative energy and other green technologies will create the next financial bubble. His Harpers article is quite long, but it goes into detail about the Tech bubble and the housing crisis, and then finishes with the aforementioned prediction about “the next one.” His criteria: it’s government-enabled, it’s widely popular, and it has the sex appeal of future technology.

* Unfortunately, when I say “thought to,” I’m being purposefully weak. Studies done have titles like “Why Women Like to Shop”, and seek to explain our urges through untestable hypotheses like “women were conditioned to be able to spot berries and fruits in the brush; therefor, they love the color pink.” Still, there is a detectable chemical change that occurs in the brain when a person procures a new item.

Photo  Credit: Daveybot

How funny that commencement speeches are almost always boring. Except for the rare occasion, you get riled up and excited (or furious that LAST year they got BILL COSBY and THIS YEAR we get the MAYOR I mean COME ON did they even TRY? – but that, too, is tied to each class’s sense of entitlement to a brash, dashing, exciting speaker). This is the end of college, your victory day. Graduation. You *did* it. Only the speech is the rhetorical equivalent to breakfast cereal. It’s either dull or uselessly saccharine, and never as exciting as the packaging promised. About halfway through the speech, you slump in your chair and realize graduating college is not a thrilling event. You aren’t unleashed onto the world. You’re cast into it, ostracized from the debaucherous Never Never Land of College U. Your four years of themed parties (which all boil down to guys in boxers and girls in schoolgirl outfits), staying up all night to argue the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Neutral, and in general being surrounded by aspiring people of infinite potential, all end with someone who has allegedly “achieved” something that you suspect was less fun than cramming fourteen people into a Camry to go to Taco Bell.

This is why commencement speeches invariably disappoint, and why the late David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech is so breathtaking.

Hm, perhaps that’s a poor choice of words, which DFW would have enjoyed pointing out. So I’ll leave it be.

Ah, Monday. What better day than Monday to take pleasure in other people’s displeasure? You’re back at work (stop reading blogs on company time, you miscreant!) and have not one, not two, but five full days before you reach 40 hours.

To make you feel better, here’s a video of Houston drivers getting hit by lightrail trams.

Some background: during my time living in Houston, the city completed its controversial lightrail system in an attempt to alleviate traffic congestion. Forbes recently declared Houston the 5th most traffic-congested city in the country, placing it behind San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Houston beat out Boston, Chicago and New York City.

Don’t worry, people of Houston. If you keep ignoring the plain-as-day “No Left Turn” signs and getting hit by trams, you’ll be #1 in no time.

Seen on my Sunday morning run:

Finally, finally my neighborhood is constructing additional pylons.

Oh dear, I’ve gone and violated Godwin’s Law. At least I got it out of the way early, which was unavoidable as the entire point of this post is a review I read of Pat Buchanan’s new book. The former Nixon Adviser/former presidential candidate/current MSNB correspondent hops aboard the World War II revisionism short bus, and it’s obvious the NY Sun reviewer enjoyed lumping his book in with recent far-left attempts at the same. Buchanan’s thesis, according to the review, is simple: we (in particular, Britain) should not have entered war with Germany.

From the review:

There is really only one controversial claim in “Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War.” This is the notion that Britain should not have offered to guarantee Poland against Nazi aggression in April 1939, and so would not have had to go to war when the aggression came that September. This would have been the wiser course, Mr. Buchanan argues, because Hitler had no interest in war with Britain. In fact, he admired the English as racial comrades, and more than once floated the prospect of the two nations dividing up the world between them. His real target was the Soviet Union, and it would have been better for Britain and the world to allow those two monstrous tyrannies to fight each other alone.

Extrapolating this idea made for an interesting thought experiment. The review goes on to outline how Germany, if all was quiet on the western front, would have easily been the first European to win a land war in Asia. But taking Buchanan’s ideas and expanding them, suppose Hitler had only succeeded in conquering Europe, Stalin cemented his bloc in the east, and England and the U.S. remained neutral. Buchanan argues that the conflict would have been so great between the two fraternal twin totalitarian regimes that it would have solved both, and we would be living in a western wonderland today.

My question is, besides in the great Butter Battle, when has this happened?

Buchanan’s thesis is based on the idea that the two powers would tear each other apart. Or, not unlike Republican hopes of the protracted Democratic primary, that at least two powerful forces would drag each other down until the Good Guys (Capitalism; McCain) could build themselves unmolested. It’s like in Starcraft, right? You zerg rush your Terran friend and kill his drones, but he’s turtled some marines to fend them off, all while launching a counterstrike that wounds your build order. Meanwhile, the noble Protoss player in the upper right has had time to tech up, and before you know it you have a pocket of zerglings fending off 10 carriers.

Unfortunately (erm, I guess fortunately…) history did not unfold like Starcraft. Rather, history shows that two competing forces often leads to both of those forces dominating the rest of the world. For practically all of the middle ages, you have England versus France. For more than half of the 20th century, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. fought so hard and so coldly that they were by far the most powerful players. Having a rival (or even better, an enemy) ferments fanaticism and provokes passion better than any claims of manifest destiny.

There are exceptions, of course. The Romans didn’t have an equal opponent for most of their empire. Yet their protracted war with Carthage is one of the most defining periods of their military history.

Take Roger Federer. He’s one of the greatest tennis players the world has ever produced. Had Rafael Nadal not appeared, Federer would likely hold all of the records in tennis. But Nadal did appear, and their intense rivalry has led to the two of them dominating the 1 and 2 spots since 2005.

And that brings us to Iran, which might play in to Buchanan’s point. The Iranians and the Iraqis balanced each other for years, their political and religious differences making them both powerful (but peripheral) entities in the Middle East. Their wars, plus U.N. sanctions, kept either from severely unbalancing the region. But, it also lead both to build powerful armies. Now, the Iraq threat to Iran is removed, and Ahmadinejad is the most powerful figure outside of Saudi Arabia.

Competition between two nations has two effects: it ossifies the Us vs. Them mentality, and causes both parties to far out pace those outside of the conflict. A 50-year cold war between Nazis and Stalinists might have kept both in “check,” but it would have forced the rest of the world to become satellites of either side. Then, if either collapsed, the full might of the winning side would be free to will itself on a new, far weaker target.

You hear about politicians yearning for the simplicity of the Cold War, or the Neocon nostalgia for the “Good War” of World War II. The War on Terror is an attempt to create a new Us vs. Them mentality, replacing communists with terrorists (and when rhetorically at its worst, Islam). But Al Qaida does not make for a good rival. For the balancing act to occur, both sides must be on an equal footing. Otherwise, instead of Zerg/Terran/Protoss, it’s just Rebels and the Empire in a new Star Wars. And that didn’t end well for the Empire.

Have you ever noticed that:

When you nail a point, it’s the same as when you hit the nail on the head? Both imply precision, even though nailing a picture to the wall is much different than squarely hitting a nail once. Congrats on not hitting your thumb, I guess.

Then you can hammer something. If you nail a question, you got it right without difficulty. If you hammer your point home, you engaged in rhetorical brutality, pushing your position over and over until you succeeded. But how often do you use a hammer without a nail? Shouldn’t their respective metaphors be the same?

If a baseball player nailed the ball, the phrase implies he swung the bat accurately and skillfully. If he hammered the ball, he struck it with a powerful swing.

It goes to show how two tools that work together for a single purpose (to attach one thing to another thing) can take on different connotations. Once that divide occurs, the metaphors begin to diverge even further. After all, what would you think if someone said, “Man, I got so nailed last night, and then I hammered this chick?”