Unknown Melancholies

Hi!

Since this is my last microblog, I'm going to try a little experiment. Go big or go home right?

Me @ myself on the last microblog: huh, should probably start following this

Basically, I'm going to actually try and stick to the "no more than 15 minutes of work"-thing. The rules are as follows: 1) My typing these rules doesn't count as part of my alotted time, 2) I can't add any thing after the 15 minutes are up (unless I'm in the middle of a sentence), 3) gif- and picture-finding time doesn't count, and finally, 4) I can edit for typos or misspellings after the fact, but that's it.

Let's begin!

Alright so first off I want to quickly talk about my upcoming macroblog, an infographic (on what? I can't say--guess you'll have to read it to find out! I originally wanted to have the infographic be about the rise of the tobacco industry into the role of the "emperor of all carcinogens" but realized that that was totally unrealistic because that meant squeezing 35 pages-worth into a single infographic. I didn't want all of that great information to go to waste though (especially not the FTC, because it's literally the best), so I figured I might as well share some of the notes I took. Warning for overuse of capitalization, because I got really fired up while reading.

• “Even if the surgeon general’s report provided a perfect rationale to control the tobacco industry, there was little that Washing would do--or, importantly, could do--to achieve that goal” (263).
• THUS “it fell upon an altogether odd backwater agency of Washington to cobble together the challenge to cigarettes. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)” (263).
• While originally made to regulate ads and claims made by products (did those liver pills really contain liver??? Does that anti-balding cream actually grow hair??? In essence: they answered the true questions in life)
• But up until their big break-through they were pretty loserly. I mean, in 1950, their biggest achievement was “policing the… appropriate use of the terms ‘slip-proof’ and ‘slip resistant’ versus ‘slip-retardant’ to describe floor wax” (263).
• Some real cool and important stuff right there
• But that all changed in the summer of 1957 when John Blatnik asked them to prove the efficacy of cigarette filters
• Blatnik said, sure, the FTC couldn’t regulate tobacco regularly, but they could regulate tobacco ads
• I SWEAR LITTLE IS JUST SO PUNCHABLE: “he argued that the question of testing the efficacy of filters was immaterial because, after all, there was nothing harmful to be filtered anyway” (263).
• Thus, the Blatnik hearings weren’t very effective right off the bat, but after 6 years, the surgeon general’s report revived Blatnik’s argument and got the FTC to get its butt in gear and pursue the lead
• HAH GOTEE: FTC said cigarette manufacturers would need to alert consumers to the risk on the product itself so “cigarette packages were thus to be labeled with Caution: Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Heath. It May Cause Death from Cancer and Other Diseases” (264).
• Unsurprisingly, the tobacco industry FREAKED and turned to Abe Fortas and Earle Clements for help
• They made this strategy: ask to be regulated by Congress rather than the FTC
• V smart; knew Congress would be way more sympathetic to their interests; “the tobacco industry had bribed politicians and funded campaigns so extensively over the years that negative political action was inconceivable” (264).
• Plus thought Congress would be so embarrassed by the FTC’s bold demand that it’d basically stick it to the FTC
• AND SO the FTC’s original bill (the FCLAA bill) got watered down to the warning: Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. The “dire, potent” language was removed. State laws were also folded in to make it so that NO FRICKING STRONGER WARNING COULD BE PUT ON A CIGARETTE LIKE WHAT THE HECK; WASHINGTON WHAT ARE YOU DOING???
• “Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters” because, as Journalist Elizabeth Drew said, Congress was the “best filter yet” (265).
• So while a disappointment, it did galvanize antitobacco forces
• “The twisting of an unknown piece of trade law into a regulatory noose for tobacco was both symbolic and strategic: an unregulatable industry had been brought to heel--even if partially so” (265).

That aside, I wanted to get to the reason behind my forcing-myself-to-follow-the-15-minute-guideline: I've definitely got like an "overkill" switch on or something. My notes for the first half of the book (mostly quotes I liked or things I wanted to remember) came to about 5 pages. My notes for the 35 or so pages I had originally planned the infographic to be about? 7 pages. Yup. And I only ended up using about 1/5 of them in the end after I came to the brilliant conclusion that there was absolutely no way I was fitting 7 pages worth of notes into a single infographic. It was kind of (okay, really, really) frustrating realizing I'd done all of that work--including starting an infographic (included below)--only to end up not using it.

RIP this infographic. Forever unfinished.