Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet

I've always admired masters of spin, whether or not I agree with their ideology. There's something admirable in the artful manipulation of language, a brilliant semantic accomplishment to be recognized and lauded. Because, of course, in the so-called "progressive" nonprofit and advocacy world, spin is just renamed "messaging." But it's the same consistent phrasing of ideas, the same red herrings tossed in, the same re-shifting of dialogue. Sometimes all that is called propaganda --your attitude just depends on what side of the words you're on. Which might explain why (since for most of my life I've spent curricular, extracurricular, and income-taxable time dealing with "messaging") I remain suspicious of anything less than brutal honesty.

So of course I loved Thank You for Smoking. There was the underlying topic of cross-sections of government, media, and capitalism. But the overall it was a homage to spin and its role in the great American marketplace of ideas.