Brussels Sprout2.rtf 09.05.

20 10:54 PM

Marketing the Fall - Brussels Sprouts and the Fall of Society

by Guy A. Duperreault

Brussels sprouts. That's what the Romans saw, shortly before their society collapsed and fell into
darkness. It wasn't brioche that marked the commencement of the finis for the frog aristocratique.
History lied, because I know now that it was Brussels sprouts falling to the floor like green frogs from
a Biblical sky or even better, a Tom Cruise movie.

And while the promulgators of historical myth delusionally cite a plethora of conflicting reasons for
any society's decay, be they economic, social, technological or some combination, it was with the
puddle of green sprouts at my feet I that I experienced a small end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it
epiphany. I know now, irrefutably, that the only thing, maybe, that successful societies learn from
the lessons of history is that societies do not learn from the lessened and dead societies of yore. It is
the Brussels sprout that marks the turning point of a society – at least for our society.

These specific thoughts did not arise at the time I was struggling with getting into my single use
petroleum built bag more Brussels sprouts than fell to the floor from the poorly designed and cruelly
situated display in the local chapter of one of our national supermarket chains. Rather, they
began to
'...bustle like a Surinam toad,
with little toads sprouting out of back,
side and belly,
vegetating while...'

I crawled through what some of Canada's 'Canada Day' journalists and editorialists thought
Canada 'meant'.

As I read I cogitated on the produce manager's bemused explanation for, and sad acceptance
of, the fall to store floor of the cascade of Brussels sprouts. My cogitation was comprised of the
regurgitation of the exchange I had had at the time in the store with the produce manager. I had
with some impatience suggested to the him that 'his' department's method of proffering the
Brussels sprouts was asinine and surely must waste a great deal of his time as he and his staff
chased after sprouts all day.

"Yes," he agreed with a wry smile, "it does."

He read the unspoken but uni-browed question writ on my face large, because, after a short
pause he added that "The reason they are put up there is because of their colour."

"What do you mean?" I asked, with words this time.

"The marketing people back east assign the layout of the produce based on their colour. Brussels

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sprouts look best up there beside the [sweet bell] peppers. You get used to picking them up after
a while."

In Canada, to mark our recently passed 140th year of nationhood, some of our editorialists,
journalists, and columnists examined what makes Canada vibrant and what puts it on the
endangered list. The likes of a Margaret Wente (Globe & Mail Jun 30, 2007 p. A15) see in our
recent immigration policies the seeds of Canada's decay through a lack of cohesiveness:
Canada is '254 solitudes and counting,' she avers. The puzzling delimitation of her Canadian
perspective was fully explicated when she confessed to having lived thirty successful years in an
enclave of white middle class Canada. (That is both remarkable and perturbing, for that is
certainly not my Canada, despite my middle aged, middle classed, white maleness.) For Andrew
Coyne (National Post Jun 30, 2007 p. A16), Canada's demise will be through the deepening
of the dozen or so solitudes the provinces are hubristicly erecting in an effort to find their truth and
independence while exploiting the free rent they demand as their due for enduring the pain of
living the good life with impotent parents. John Allemang, on the other hand (Globe & Mail Jun
30, 2007, p. F1), dispels the myth of solitudes by reconnecting with an Afghan family he'd
known twenty years earlier as recent immigrants Canada.

Allemang was delighted in his surprise at both their vital and vibrant presence in Canada, and
Canada's vital and vibrant presence in them. "We are safe", was the patriarch's homage to his
new home away from civil war. It is that safety that gave his family the foundation to grow
Canada as they grew. His daughter epitomizes the fallacy of the statisticians' claims of isolation, in
her well realized and articulate struggle to balance the demands of her spirit's urge to find and
express her Canadian independence, while respecting and honouring the familial demands for
interdependence that come with her heritage. The entire family have spent years of their lives first
as conduits then as bridges and now as highways between Canada and themselves. There is no
solitude here!

Nor is there is isolation. I absolutely do not understand how Wente could live in Canada and not
know that the engineer in training finishing her degree is a child of Vietnamese boat people; or
that the Canadian server of East Indian descent with a Portugese name, has a criminology
degree, who is looking to be an outreach worker, and is the daughter of an immigrant woman
who survived drunken spousal abuse to achieve her masters degree while working as a social
worker helping the disadvantaged; or that the pizzeria owner is an experienced civil engineer from
Iraq unable to practice his trade because of an abuse of educational conservativism. These
Canadians are everywhere, and nowhere from them do I hear a Wente-style moan for simplistic
national encomiums to hockey or medicare or a Celine inspired for-our-own-good STAR system.
Instead, in what most precisely describes the Canadian experience, there is a complex world of
relationship, responsibility to self and others, between the whole and the family and the Self.

Jingoists, MBAs, propagandists, economists, marketers, accountants and the current breed of
politician who seem mostly derived from these mal-educated, pelf-based sects of our secularist
society seem largely without comprehension of either their ignorance of what makes a society

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more than its economy. Like Wente they strive for singular, simplistic, truths that allow them to
ignore, dismiss, denigrate and debase the social complexity that is Canada. For these people,
held up as our 'leaders', they found either stupid or incomprehensible that 'their' Canadian public
would have the audacity to revolt against using tax dollars to save a hockey team. When these
forward thinking hucksters put forward the Senators' fix to keep alive the quintessential symbol of
Canadian spirit, they had no thought of the public reaction they would get, that the lumpen
would dare to choose not to be amused to death with tax dollars better spent fixing a failing
medical system.

And that is the difference between marketing leadership and actually leading – the former
requires shills, the latter requires ears. This particular disconnect is only one demonstration of just
how far away our leaders are from their society. It is really no different than the produce manager
picking up endless steams of Brussels sprouts because someone with a degree on the importance
of colour management in the selling of a dream has tyrannical control over produce logistics.

Oddly enough, but as Canadian as the Caesar drink, and not atypically, by far the most
accurate comment I read about being Canadian came from one of the supposed fluffy throw
away sections of our newspapers. What was it I'd read that was more Canadian than Wente's
whine? I learned, from the "Food" section of The National Post of the delightful complexity of the
Caesar as discussed by A. Brouwer & A. Wilson. "The Caesar is a drink that perfectly embodies the
ingenuity and diversity of Canadians...[because of] the unlikely combination of booze and bizarre
juices...." ("Clam Got Your Tongue?" Jun 30, 2007 p. WP6.)

The likes of Neil Postman described in general terms the death of (American) society through its
narcissistic and masturbatory obsessioin on amusement fixes. Postman wrote Amusing Ourselve
to Death a good twenty years before the likes of a sarcastic social commentator like Rex Murphy
would wily collude with and abet our masturbatory obsessions by writing of Paris Hilton's size two,
seven figure income earning persona, by pointedly claiming not to be writing about her while
claiming to have not watched Larry King 'get' the jail bird brained blond in order to complete his
review of the year of the stinkin' Rose (Rosie O'Donnell) in "The View" ("Larry 'got' Paris but I
don't get it' The Globe & Mail Jun 30, A15.)

Others, the un-populists like Morris Berman, Linda McQuaig, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and
John Ralston Saul describe the failures of education as the precipitous event that will lead to the
failure of Western civilization and our next dark age. Naomi Klein and film-makers like Michael
Moore, and (Canadians) Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott of "The Corporation", look to the
corporatization and commodification of the world and especially the depersonalization of its
employees from people to labour as the biggest threat to the continued functioning of society. (To
this point, tucked into a tiny corner of The Globe & Mail (Jun 30, F2) is: "I felt it was a fairly
small thing, just hitting and swearing at the workers and not giving them wages", while in another
corner was the corollary "China strengthens labour protection" The Globe & Mail Jun 30, 2007
A12. I think it interesting to note which labour story was told in the important 'A" section of the
paper, and which in the fluffy "F" section.)

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Despite all these 'truths' and well articulated failures of our society, the greatest harbinger of our
society's decay was the reason for the scattering of Brussels sprouts across my local Safeway's
produce shelves and floors: they were placed in a high, difficult to reach sloped shelf because of
their colour – and the produce manager smiled, wryly, at 'having' to spend significant allotments
of his time picking them up off the floor to please the educated marketers and MBAs who know
best how to run a shill. Our MBA, marketing and accountancy emperors are naked, and we smile
wryly, and bow down to their munificent clothes, and pick their waste up from off the floor.

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