Anybody read Watchmen?  Alan Moore was spot on when he included the concept of social retrospection during times of hard ship and uncertainty.  In times of trouble, nostalgia becomes popular, while overly progressive attitudes and a 'futurist' aspect wane.  This is exemplified in Watchmen by the marketing of a perfume.  In the beginning of the novel, during a time of near revolution, discomfort and anger the popular perfume of the time is called 'Nostalgia'.  By the end, these posters have been replaced for a product named 'Millenium', reflecting the optimism and fresh zeitgeist.  It was well observed.

This psychology has given rise to a ridiculous spate of advertisxing campaigns - for example, can anyone tell me who was the first supermarket in the UK to introduce the avocado?  Why the hell would anyone know this?  Even I don't.  But at present, both Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's seem to be claiming the same thing.  Their TV advertxs are almost identical.  It's all about how they've been around for years, serving the British public and have been awfully progressive and friendly and at some point in the sixties (thanks to them), the avocado was introduced to the UK bringing with it a taste so bland that you'd have to also fork out for a bunch of other exotic ingredients to make the damn thing palatable. 

Then there is the Hovis adverxt.  The one with the kid running home, while a moving montage of events, the suffrage movement, VE Day and the miner's strike plays in the background.  The message being that Hovis has been through the same things we have (and therefore we would like to eat their bread).

More are to come.  Radox's new campaign is also going to feature a tale of its 100 year heritage.  This is not a coincidence.  Why else would anybody care how long a shampoo has been around for? 

So now "New" is no longer a self-evident virtue.  "New" now has connotations of wastefulness, expensiveness, foolhardiness and guilt.

This is understandable, but is it A Good Thing'?  One expects businesses to create or explore current trends in thinking - they can recognise that we are unhappy with the world in general and would wish to exploit that. 

But it's worse - we don't see recovery in sight... in fact, do we even want recovery?  Do we want to revert to the status quo of inflation and a lunatic economy?  Probably not, but do we want to become introverted, feather our nests and comfort ourselves with our own meagre but sufficient surroundings?  The attitude of 'fuck it' that over 60% of us said to the European elections, as well as to all the banks and big businesses and governments is all well and good but then we can't expect them to pull us out of think funk either.  If a man pushes you in the river, don't expect him to pull you out (unless your plan is to pull him in as he pulls you out, but then you'll find you're alone on the shore and nobody wants your help and this analogy isn't working).

Hopefully, we won't be throwing out the baby with the bath water.  We've allowed a massive pile of garbage to build up in the corner of kitchen that desperately needs to be got rid of, but underneath it all there's a nice metal swing bin, a double wall socket and this analogy doesn't work either.

I suppose that's why I try to remain positive.  Banks and governments may be incompetant, but WE aren't.  So don't hold back on their behalf.  We're not gonna slow down cos they fucked up.  We're just gonna have to circumvent them somehow.  Prove we don't need them, so next time they come and push us into the river, we pull a vaulting-pole out of our bum and leap over onto the other side and that analogy kicked ass.