they feed your pride with boredom

I was doing some research (translation: flipping through justifiably forgotten comic books from the 1980’s) for an upcoming post when I came across this advertisement:

It was in one of those dense three-column ad pages that have since gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Even if you’re not a comic book fan or collector, I’m sure you have an idea of what I’m talking about, those eyestrain-inducing crazy quilts of pitches for correspondence schools, foreign stamps/coins, karate lessons, and other dubious propositions buried in the middle third of nearly every comic published up until the mid-1990’s. I never really paid attention to them when I was a kid, and pay even less attention to them when I come across them nowadays while reading a musty refugee from the quarter bin, but this one happened to catch my eye with its ultra crude lettering (that’s the “Jr. High Notebook Sans” font in the title caption, I believe) and accompanying illustration. Then I read the ad copy and knew that I had a real winner on my hands.

This is the AMERICAN WAY not oriental. Apparently the wave of Japanophobia that washed across American culture in the 70’s and 80’s managed to extend as far as martial arts techniques (in a really low budget manner). In the automotive and electronics fields, the bitter taste of the early fruits of globalization was tied into greater economic issues – a slumping economy, rising unemployment, factory closures, the retrenchment of the labor movement. “Buy American” was a clever bit of smoke and mirrors propaganda that played of off xenophobia and more tangible economic anxieties. Corporate leaders used diminishing market shares as an excuse to break the post World War II social contract, while refusing to adapt their products for a changing environment. Continuing to put out acre-long behemoths that got 16 mpg highway at a time when gas prices had gone from thirty-five cents a gallon to a buck and change a gallon would seem to be a more logical reason for failure than employee benefits or a conspiracy helmed by shifty zaibatsu. Americans have always had a difficult time looking at the big picture and thinking long term.

Pitching an all-American method of self-defense though? That’s just bizarre. Most of the folks I know who are into that sort of thing revel in the ex oriente lux overtones. They’re the mystical and exotic icing on the cake, inseparable from the whole martial arts experience. What would the AMERICAN WAY of self defense consist of, anyhow? Guns, alcohol, and axe handles? Two shitfaced guys in a parking lot pushing each other’s chests until both of them fall, then rolling around on the ground grabbing shirts and rabbit punching each other? Or maybe something like this exhibition of the sweet science. (Warning: Pretty gruesome, contains much profanity.)

I wonder what happened to AMERICO? In my mind’s eye, I imagine it located in one of those brick and glass monstrosities visible from the highway, with immaculately landscaped grounds and a classy lobby area decorated with stills from The Quiet Man and Straw Dogs. It would have been a pretty nice place to work, providing that one understood that parking a Subaru in the lot or bringing a bento box in for lunch was grounds for termination. The weekly staff meetings would start off with a pep talk by the CEO…

…followed by a slide show from the R&D folks demonstrating how the “Twenty Ways to Inflict Grevious Bodily Harm with an Ordinary Plastic Ice Scraper” rollout will allow the firm to seize a greater market share from rival Karatedyne in Q4.

Or the entire business could have been one individual hand-stapling eightieth generation photocopied pamphlets together in a seedy furnished apartment by the train tracks.

Soft Boys – I Wanna Destroy You (from Underwater Moonlight, 1980) – Psychedelic sounds and punk sensibilities collide, with wondrous results.

Modern Warfare – Street Fightin’ Man (from Hell Comes to Your House, Volume 1, 1981) – In which the Stones are ground into sharp pieces of gravel.

(Thanks to Kevin for providing the exterior shot of AMERICO corporate offices.)