Hygienic? Really? I'll give you hygienic

I've complained about advertising before, but this is new so read on .... (and yes, still grooving but will not call anyone li'l monster). From the day the first innkeeper or cobbler hung out a sign letting people know what his service or product was, that bunch of scoundrels drawn to advertising has looked for new and better ways to make us want, need, have to have the products they hawk. Some efforts have been cute, some insulting, some infuriating... well, that's the picture, pick an emotion and reaction and you can find an advertisement that fits it.

The ones that are bothering me these days are the ones that are meant to instill fear or apprehension because you don't have a product or service. Am I going to die if my credit score is 639 instead of 640? Is it worth $15 a month to find out what it is? Hardly. The diseases invented in order to make you worry and buy some drug you probably don't need are another in this genre. Restless leg syndrome? Please. Some drug or advertising guy trying to fall asleep and feeling a tremor in his leg thinking hey I bet we can convince somebody this is really a disease and they need a drug we can sell them. There are so many of these. But, now, here's the lead in to the one most offensive these days.

When swine flu broke out with the subsequent prevention advisory that came down, soap manufacturers were all over it. Pretty soon brand new hand sanitizing products sprouted everywhere (the one by the coffee machine at work) and we were advised to constantly be on the alert and clean our hands. I wonder how much more of that product sold since swine flu compared with before. But recently there has been a one-up product. Some creative mind decided hand (and counter and other surfaces) cleaners weren't enough. Now somebody has come up with a cleaner, backed by a fear concept, for the little hand pump on the hand sanitizer bottles. Do you know how many germs can linger on that little thumb friendly pump? Gooooood Greeeeeef.

In other words we are now supposed to wash our hands in order to wash our hands and use a cleanser with a thumb-operated plunger to clean the thumb-operated plunger on the bottle we use to wash our hands before we use the bottle we use to wash our hands. And we are supposed to worry about that. I bet I could lick that plunger for a week and not get sick.

And, what about the germs on the bottle of stuff you use to clean the bottle of hand sanitizer? It is almost a chicken and egg sort of situation. Carried out to its logical conclusion, at some point in the process you have to touch a plunger that hasn't been cleaned by a preceding product.

But think of all the sales for all those cleansers. Remember the most important sales innovation in shampoo? The one that doubled sales? "Rinse and repeat." Well, "clean the bottle you use to clean your hands" might be right up there with it. And all of it is based on a panicked fear of a swine flu pandemic that barely materialized. That's not to say health warnings shouldn't be listened to, but more to be aware how the advertising industry will jump on them and use any angle they can think of to scare us into buying their products.

I have to go now and clean a bottle of hand sanitizer so I can wash my hands to use my hand sanitizer before I step into the shower (washed down with a pre-cleaned dispenser of Lysol) so I can wash what's left of my hair, then rinse and repeat.

All this cleanser talk reminds me of a passage in John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie." In a motel in New Mexico or Arizona he focused on that little paper banner proclaiming this toilet seat had been sanitized. In that moment he recalled a time in the Sahara desert when a nomad offered him a grime-encrusted glass so he could take a drink from an oasis. He said as dirty as that glass was, it produced the finest drink of water in his entire recollection, and then he went on into Americans' preoccupied compulsion about hygiene. But, that leads us into a new direction, so enough for today.