Easily Among the Top Ten Greatest Marketing Failures in American History

Your Aunt Slugger doesn't check her mail much. I'd like to say that this is because I have moved to paperless billing and am thereby reducing wasteful mailings, but this is definitely not true. No, your Aunt Slugger does not check her mail much because the mailbox is in a centrally located building in her apartment complex, and it is out of her way. And by "out of her way," your Aunt Slugger means, "not right next to her door."

Your Aunt Slugger also receives a great deal of junk mail. Almost an unprecedented amount of junk mail. I trace this back to an ill-advised purchase I made from a coin dealer. Your Aunt Slugger does not collect coins, nor does she have strong feelings about coins one way or the other. But I saw this article about a glow-in-the-dark Canadian quarter and figured this coin would make a nice, if not sophisticated, addition to my curio cabinet full of Muppets glasses. I paid $35 for this coin, waited six months to get it, and then also received a commemorative Elvis coin for my patience. I have subsequently received a number of phone calls from this coin dealer, including one where I was sucked into the conversation with tales of a special panda coin.

"Well that sounds interesting," I said. "How much does that cost?"

"Two thousand dollars."

So my coin collection still only consists of the dinosaur coin, the commemorative Elvis coin, and a gold coin that I found on the ground and initially thought was a unique foreign coin until I realized it was a Chuck E. Cheese token.

Anyway, back to my original point: I am fairly certain I receive a lot of junk mail because the coin people sold my name and information to anyone out there who has a product to sell. All of this junk mail goes in the recycling bin, but I do have to sift through it for real mail, like letters from my grandmother and pamphlets advertising pizza deals.

So yesterday I finally dug into my pile of junk mail, and in this pile was what may be the single weirdest item I have ever received in the mail: an offer to subscribe to a magazine entitled "Angels on Earth." I decided to open this piece of mail. Below is the text of the letter, altered only slightly to use my legal name, Aunt Slugger.

I received an offer of three free gifts if I take them up on their offer of a free issue: A 2014 angel wall calendar, an angel afghan, and a mystery gift. I also received two FREE personalized bookmarks and a tear-out blessing card, presumably so I can give it to the Israelites and save their souls.

Your Aunt Slugger is not disparaging the people who subscribe to this magazine. People are allowed to believe in angels and read about them. But your Aunt Slugger is DEFINITELY disparaging the FUCKING IDIOT who thought your Aunt Slugger was in this magazine's target market. Yes, I realize that these marketing folks cast a wide net to try to reel in a few fish. But this...this net was too big. A glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coin DOES NOT an angel enthusiast make.

I also find it hard to believe that angels support mass mailings, or that they would charge me $14.95 for a bi-monthly magazine about them, but then again, I am no expert. I took a few Renaissance art history classes in college, and the only thing angels seemed to do in the sixteenth century was hand out white lilies to the Virgin Mary over and over and over and over again. So really, what do I know.

If anyone needs two free bookmarks or a blessing card to convert the heathens, you know how to reach me.

When Idiots Are Given Access to Technology

Here at Aunt Slugger HQ, we do still periodically find ourselves amazed by what people are willing to put on the internet. And here I am not referring to videos of animals bathing in time with an intolerably high-pitched version of a Bobby Darin song, because really, that's art. No, what I am referring to are people who do not realize that the magnitude of their ignorance is a.) not recordable by any standard cognitive tests, and b.) so outrageous it's comical.

The story I am referring to is, of course, the Twitter response to a performance of "God Bless America" at the All-Star baseball game. It seems that Marc Anthony, a well-known singer from New York, sang this song at the game. Your Aunt Slugger is actually familiar with Marc Anthony, despite being almost clinically unable to match a song with its artist; I was introduced to Marc Anthony in college, when a classmate in my "International Political Economy" class invited me over for a study group and played this song on repeat. So whenever I hear or read about Marc Anthony, I think about the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Anyway, it seems that our fellow Americans took to Twitter en force to bitch about "a Mexican singing God Bless America."

Some examples of these Tweets include, but are not limited to, the following:

• "How they going to pick a got (sic) damn Mexican to sing God Bless AMERICA?"
• "Shouldnt (sic) an AMERICAN be signing (sic) God Bless America? #getoutofmycountry #allstargame"
• "Another disgrace (sic) Marc Anthony singing god (sic) bless (sic) America. Is he even an American citizen?"

Well, there you have it, readers. Apparently, our nation's xenophobes have decided to fight the allegedly deleterious influence of non-English speaking immigrants by having what is at best a weak grasp of the English language. They are going to preserve the nation's dominant language by making flagrantly false and racist statements in Tweets so laden with grammatical errors that we are left wondering if a feral animal has walked across their keyboard.

So to my foreign-born readers who sometimes think their English isn't great, or who are embarrassed by their language skills, stop. Because here we have a group of Americans who were born and educated here, and they are barely literate. You are already ahead of them.

And with that, I am going to go listen to some more Marc Anthony and think about Alan Greenspan.

At least it's not 1955, right? Right...?

As a white person, your Aunt Slugger does occasionally find herself in situations where other white people, assuming that because your Aunt Slugger is white she will "understand," make racist remarks to her. Examples include, but are not limited to, the following:

• "You probably don't want to buy a house in that town. The schools are, shall I say...diverse?" 
• "The blacks can stop complaining now that we have a black guy in the White House." 
• "Is it bad that when you said what the charges were, I knew the defendant was black?"
• "I am glad that Barack Obama isn't acting like some 'homie.'"

These comments come from coworkers, acquaintances, and of course complete strangers. As a white person, this is perhaps the only race-related burden I can claim to bear: unwanted association with racist white people who don't realize they're racist.

Periodically, there will be long stretches of time between these comments, and with the passage of time comes a mellowing of my opinions on exactly how many people are racists. And I think how far we have come as a society. I read books like this one and I think, "Well, at least no one is shipping himself to Philadelphia in a box to escape slavery any more." Progress.

And then there is the story of Emmett Till. Emmett Till was a black kid from Chicago who spoke to a white woman in Mississippi and was beaten beyond recognition to his death because of that. This was in 1955. The white murderers were positively identified by a black witness in the courtroom (which in and of itself was an event, for a black man to openly show anything other than deference to whites). The jury acquitted the defendants after about an hour, with one juror reporting that it would have taken less time had they not taken a break to get soda.

You read that, and you think, "By god, we have come so far." And I am not denying that there has been progress. The George Zimmerman jurors, for example, at least had the decency not to tell us they took an eighteen hour soda break.

But then there is this case. A black defendant, exercising the "Stand Your Ground" law in Florida, fired warning shots to keep her abusive husband away. She did not kill her husband. No one died.

And the jury found her guilty in fifteen minutes. They were apparently not in the mood for soda. 

The point of all this is that I find myself once again issuing a

CRITICAL PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.
 
If you do not believe racism still exists, and that blacks and other minorities are not marginalized by our society's laws, policies, and judicial system, you are - and I mean no offense here - clinically brain dead. To be a white person and not understand that white people are afforded certain luxuries, like being statistically less likely to be shot by armed vigilantes, assumed to be bilking the welfare system, or being profiled by law enforcement officials, then YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. YOU are the reason a jury acquitted George Zimmerman. YOU are the reason that minorities are still haunted, years later, by Plessy vs. Ferguson and Jim Crow. You are the reason.

And you will probably dismiss your Aunt Slugger as a bleeding heart white liberal. And this is fine. Because at least I am not you.

A New Entry in the Guinness Book of World Records

Dear Aunt Slugger, 

What do you think about the George Zimmerman trial, and what do you think of its broader implications?

Sincerely, 
Margaret D. Tomkins, Milwaukee


Hello Margaret, 

It's funny you should bring this up, Margaret D. Tomkins of Milwaukee, because I was just thinking about this as I was reading this morning's paper. I was drinking an iced tea from Starbucks and reading an op-ed piece about how the prosecution hasn't proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and how he will probably walk. And it does kind of sound as though there is reasonable doubt from a legal perspective, despite the fact that the fuckstick is clearly a murderer.

And as I was reading this, I said to myself, "You know, maybe now, when George Zimmerman walks free after shooting an unarmed teenager, we as a nation will ask ourselves how we have allowed this to happen, how we have allowed gun ownership to become a more basic right than access to Sudafed, and maybe there will be some change -" And then I slapped myself, and vowed only to buy this hallucinogenic iced tea from Starbucks on the weekends.

So that is what I think of the broader implications, Margaret D. Tomkins. A young black man has died in an act of senseless gun violence, and in keeping with what has become a legislative tradition, not one single fuck will be given. Not one single fuck. An armed vigilante engages in racial profiling and shoots an unarmed kid, and our nation's lawmakers will set the record for the number of negative fucks ever given. 

But I received a full-body pat down when I accidentally did not include my mango tango gel deodorant in a TSA-approved clear plastic baggie of liquids in line at airport security last week. So the lesson here is that you may actively seek out a confrontation and shoot a young black man at your leisure, but don't you fucking dare try to refresh your armpits at the airport without proper security clearance.

Sincerely, 
Aunt Slugger