Hooray For Me!
A Friendly Rant From Captain Spaulding
(Captain Spaulding Action Figures Sold Separately)

SYMPATHY CARDS IN THE OFFING

When people talk about the megacorporations that have an impact on everyone's life, it's a pretty short list. Coca-Cola, for its ubiquity. GM, because it's the world's largest automaker. Sony, which manufactures everything and anything. McDonald's, which if nothing else has made the venerable Scots prefix "Mc" an attachment to any product which is served up quickly and is irredeemably shoddy. Nike, the ten-ton behemoth of athletic footwear and urban armed robbery.

Why doesn't anyone ever mention Hallmark?

The Kansas City-based greeting card company is the only capitalist entity of which I'm aware that has actually influenced the calendar. Just ask any guy with a woman in his life; he'll tell you that

Valentine's Day and (especially) the egregiously superfluous Sweetest Day in October are "conspiracies by the greeting card companies." While Whitman, Godiva, Brach, and other specialty chocolatiers and FTD and the rest of the floral industry must be complicit in this "conspiracy," greeting-card-market bully Hallmark has to be the muscle behind these dates of male romantic obligation.

Even worse is Mother's Day. The United States Postal Service says that the days leading up to Mother's Day are the busiest of the year for them, even busier than Christmas. Again, what gift offering is most commonly associated with this day? Again, the confectionary folks and the flower peddlers piggyback on Hallmark.

Hallmark is a child of a changing world. It used to be that loved ones separated by distance marked the changes in your life--birthdays, marriages, births, deaths--by writing you a letter. In a postwar America that grew busier and less thoughtful, the greeting card proved the perfect substitute for personal letters on occasions where a phone call just wouldn't do. They were sentimental and sincere, and the calligraphy and pretty pictures on the front screamed tastefulness. Once some R&D flunky discovered that you could reach those people with a low tolerance for bathos by selling humorous cards as well, Hallmark was off to the races.

But like every leviathan of a specific industry from Microsoft to Kleenex, Hallmark has lots of little guys nipping at its heels. With its market share in constant peril, Hallmark has had to make good on its promise to the American public to provide them with "a card for every occasion." Struggling to find a new niche in American life that might require a greeting card, Hallmark hit upon an idea recently that is, to say the least, interesting:

Suicide cards.

Hallmark has test-marketed sympathy cards that would be sent to the loved one of a person who kills her- or himself. Displayed under their own "Suicide" signage, the cards appeared in six cities in recent months. As reported by the American Medical News, Hallmark reported an "overwhelmingly positive response" to the cards. Whether that means that people merely liked the idea or that they actually bought the cards, the AMN news item does not say.

While I haven't come across any comments from the Hemlock Society or from Dr. Jack Kevorkian on this significant consumer development in their field, the other side of the conscience divide was not hesitant about speaking out on the subject. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, conservative priest-pundit and editor of First Things, said, "Hallmark's decision is a testimony to the infinite creativity of capitalism, and to our culture's continuing determination to mainstream the aberrant in the hope that the very concept of the aberrant will one day be eliminated."

While I always respect (and often agree with) the good father's opinion, in this case I believe that he is being a bit of a doomsayer. A brief test-marketing capped by an obviously self-serving corporate press release will not usher in an apocalypse of the despondent plunging off of bridges secure in the knowledge that those they leave behind will receive some nice cards. Unlike such suicide-friendly cultures as Japan and ancient Rome, ours is a country where people are still put off by the concept of killing oneself. The shame and silence that surrounds survivors of the self-terminated guarantee that there won't be any flowery Hallmark pleasantries falling into their mailboxes anytime soon.

Then again, Neuhaus has proved to be an accurate Cassandra in the past. If Dr. Jack and his Rube Goldberg potion-pumper becomes as accepted a figure in American life as, say, Ralph Nader or Martha Stewart, Hallmark may just be in the vanguard of suicide acceptance. If it becomes socially proper to do away with yourself, then it will become a much more palatable fait accompli for the dead person's survivors. But, since there is still the messiness of mourning and other life transitions for them, the suicide greeting card could be just the tonic for the bereaved.

Picture such salutations in the well-known Hallmark style as, "So your wife has killed herself..."; "We grieve with you at your daughter's self-hanging..."; "Our sympathies on the occasion of your finding your dad's body beside the shotgun..."; or "Pills can be such a tragic thing...". Personalized, specific, touching, and...appropriate?

How long could it be before the humor department adds its own suicide line? "Yippee! He finally went through with it!"; "Sure sorry to hear about that mess you had to clean up!"; "So, what will you be doing with all that new free time on your hands?"; "And to think that you didn't want a gun in the house!"; "Looks like someone forgot to tell 'Superman' that there was kryptonite on that ledge!"

Once Hallmark has overcome the taboos surrounding suicide, other heretofore off-limits fields could prove to be white unto harvest for them. Disease-specific cards: "In sympathy for your HIV-positive test"; "Pancreatic cancer can be so tragic..."; "You have such a loving heart...so sorry it had to be triple-bypassed"; "Upon hearing of your lupus...". Pointed-sympathy breakup cards: "I always thought that you were too good for him"; "Congratulations upon your freeing yourself from

that man"; "To my friend: There's a better-looking woman out there somewhere for you!" Even life-issue greeting cards: "I know how you struggle with procrastination"; "Infidelity is never an easy thing to face..."; "Just because people in the office don't like you doesn't mean that you aren't special to me...".

Greeting cards containing chips that played music when you opened the card were quite the fad a few years ago. I can see the suicide line bringing them back for Hallmark. Imagine a card that would play a tinny, delicate little version of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper", Cheap Trick's "Auf Wiedersehen", Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide Solution", or the dB's "Amplifier" when you opened it. The country-music line alone could drive up Hallmark stock ten points on the NYSE.

The crowning touch, of course, would be an insidious lobbying of the American public via advertising to establish a Suicide Day where we remember loved ones who took the final plunge or those who survived someone else's. Hallmark would find some empty spot on the calendar to have it, of course, to further stabilize the seasonally up-and-down nature of greeting card sales. The dog days of August would be perfect for Suicide Day. And FTD and Whitman would be one step behind to help you comfort the grieving widow and the bereft mother all over again.

Father Neuhaus, give this one up. You can't stop the onrushing train of capitalism. Why would you want to step onto the tracks?

Captain Spaulding

E-Mail CaptainSpaulding

Previous Mountaintop Experiences with Captain Spaulding:

Hooray For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?

Hooray For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations

Hooray For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel

Hooray For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic

Hooray For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee

Hooray For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup

Hooray For Me #7-- Princess Diana

Hooray For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat

Hooray For Me #9-- Mother Teresa

Hooray For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash

Hooray For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?

Hooray For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks from Soccer

Hooray For Me #13-- O Canada! Who Stands on Guard For Thee?

Hooray For Me #14-- Suicide is Painless, but Loss of Creative...

Hooray For Me #15-- Synergy for the Devil

Hooray For Me #16-- Of Hissy Fits and Human Freedoms

Hooray For Me #17-- Naked Raygun's Hook Back in Anger

Hooray For Me #18-- Trees 2, Celebrities 0

Hooray For Me #19-- What Grad Students Need to Know About Sex

Hooray For Me #20-- Just Another Yellow Brick in the Road

Hooray For Me #21-- Can "Soy Bomb" Save the Oscars

Hooray For Me #22-- I Pick the Songs

Hooray For Me #23-- Asking Me Lies (Replacements, Alex Chilton)

Hooray For Me #24-- Careless Whispers From the Vox Populi

Hooray For Me #25-- Seinfeld Farewell

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