Marketers want the ease of a level field. Marketing wants people to be, down to their depths, uniform and pliant as a box of Cheerios. Advertisers--this is where the selling happens--they want the feel of the atavistic original genius of humanity in their ads. They want to make the commercial's viewer feel as if it were he himself who were making the discovery, had invented and built, piece by piece, the Jaguar. (Success of Patagonia, of Sir Edmund's own down jacket.)

The survival genes of the race demand that original thinkers come along. Each time one comes forth he'll be viewed as something wild and heretical, foolish.

A MacGowan, a Hemingway, is able to ignore the commercial messages broadcast at him to get him to behave. He'll come along and create, enabling the 'old song,' the powers of the mind. He'll grasp the magic of objects.

This is why the best of art, architecture, painting, music, etc., walks the line between whatever advancements there may be and the primitive, the folk wisdom. Much like Shane MacGowan's, the Pogues,' music does, much like the operative moment of a Hemingway story.

But maybe, you know, it is true: Buy the Hemingway fishing pole, and you'll begin to feel your original genius coming to life.