Semantics

In college, I took a class on Advertising. As an end-of-semester project, our class was divided into teams of six, and we were instructed to design a marketing campaign to sell grapefruit juice to college students; whichever team was voted to have the best campaign according to the students and the professor got an automatic A on the project. Some teams went crass, some teams appealed to the target audience's intelligence (mistake!). Our team gave up on white grapefruit juice entirely and focused exclusively on pink grapefruit juice, using celebrities as spokespeople and tying in a donation to the Susan G. Komen fund for every bottle sold. Whatever it says about college students or advertising or simply the fight put up from the other teams, our agency won.

Do you get the sense prune advertising was likewise developed by a bunch of college students? For a while now, I've noticed that Sunsweet and the like have shied away from selling "prunes" in favor of "dried plums." Semantics, certainly, but admit it: you associate prunes with nursing homes, scuffly slippers, and worn out bathrobes. "Dried plums" almost has a hipster-y quality to it, riding the tailcoats of dried cranberries as they rose to popularity and are now tossed in everything from cookies to salads to fancy autumn pastas. Well done, Federated Plum Growers of America, on maintaining truth in advertising while simultaneously making prunes an acceptable purchase to people not yet eligible for AARP.

Husband and I were browsing the fruit section at Costco some months back when we saw a label that made us stop in our tracks and consider for a moment. Here was a flat of plums - nicely colored, perfectly in season - that were being sold as "Fresh Prunes." Make of that what you will, America.

Dead Man

I stayed up late enough to catch the headlines just before Obama's address was aired, so I knew that it had happened and been confirmed. But I also knew I needed to get to sleep so that I could function when The Kid woke me up at 2 a.m. Husband stayed up to watch the entire speech, and had a distinctly joyful and excited tone to his voice when he came upstairs afterwards. If we were in our pre-kid days and lived somewhere urban, I suspect he would have been among the multitudes celebrating in the streets.

I can't admit to feeling the same sense of joy. Don't misunderstand - I'm not sad or disappointed. I'm absolutely glad that bin Laden is dead: one less psychopath in the world for my son to contend with. I'm just not elated. It feels somehow hollow to me. I say this with an admitted ignorance if there is in fact proof to the contrary, but bin Laden seemed, in the end, to be little more than a figurehead, a mascot, a rallying point. There were so many eyes on him, even when we couldn't see him, that it seems to me he couldn't run quite the operation he used to. In his absence, other psychopaths have taken on his mantle and are, at this moment, plotting new attacks, most of which will fail before they even get off the ground, but some of which inevitably won't.

Bin Laden's death didn't end anything, except the manhunt. The wars are still going on and will be forever, just in different places, because we're fighting a concept, a spectre. Terrorism isn't something that can be stamped out. It is and always has been. With apologies to Jeff Maguire, all it takes is someone willing to trade their life for the chance to harm whom- or whatever they view as their enemy.

So let's all take a nice, deep, cathartic breath and exhale a sigh of relief that Osama bin Laden is no longer among the living. And then let's crack our collective knuckles, rub our tired eyes, and brace ourselves for whatever may come. This is no time to lower our guard.