The Panglossian Times

Advertising has always justified itself

not merely by the products it promotes
but through the reasoning it employs

as it manipulates symbol and image

for and to whoever will pay it to.

To liberals advertising boasts

of 'promotes social change', 

and 'empowering minorities' 

through selling them things.

How would feminism 

ever have advanced without it? 

To social conservatives 

advertising 'promotes individuality' 

by giving us singular examples

of heroism-remember the Milk Tray man?

How romantic was that? 
and he was always ultra tidy too

-unlike most women's husbands.

It was surely advertising that created

that sign of the 80's, 'the new man'.

It improves everyone's lives,
and it feeds the muse

by changing what is manufactured.
On television it pay for the news

like nothing else is willing to
even as it undermines objectivity

via mass manipulation.

Finally advertising now justifies

the repeats of millions of old programmes

which are shown on ropy nostalgia channels,
where the content is television's history

on repeat, as if it were the history of life

because life before film never happened.

How else would we remember the Nazis?