Where the Wild Things Are: Bell Atlantic?!

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Life in Corporate America can be quite depressing. 

Even the most innocent childhood moments, even our most brilliant and
peaceful heroes, are being captured by the corporate machine's insatiable
drive for profits and power. A major depression overcame Maurice Sendak
fans when we learned last year that Max and his wild friends in his
classic Where the Wild Things Are had been appropriated by Bell Atlantic
to sell the company's telephone wares. 

Why depression? Because not every image should be destined for the
marketplace. Apple Computer should not be allowed to appropriate, through
whatever means, legal or devious, the likenesses of Gandhi, Bob Dylan and
Albert Einstein to sell hardware. There must be a limit. 

Where the Wild Things Are, a wonderful childhood story, told to us, and
told to our children, has now been corrupted by a very large and ugly
corporation. 

Where the Wild Things Are was first published in 1963 and has won a number
of prestigious awards, including the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Most
Distinguished Picture Book of the Year. 

Remember young Max? Max was acting up. Max's mom was at wit's end, so she
called him "wild thing." 

Max retaliated, told his mom, "I'll eat you up." Max was sent to bed
without eating anything. In his room, the forest grew, oceans tumbled by,
and a boat arrived. Max got in and took off to where the wild things are.
The wild things roared their terrible roars. Max rumbled with his friends
and then returned home to his room. And his food was still hot. This
beautifully written and illustrated story of childhood civil disobedience
and adventure in the jungle is now in the hands of a corporation that
charges you an arm and a leg for using the phone. 

Almost a year ago, at a press conference announcing the appropriation of
childhood memories, Bell Atlantic's Bruce Gordon, without apology or
shame, announced that "the use of Maurice Sendak's characters by Bell
Atlantic marks the first time the wild things have been used in broadside
mass-media advertising, including television." 

"The book is a fitting metaphor for the current state of the
communications industry," said Gordon. "This campaign will remind our
customers -- and reassure them, too -- that we are there for them through
this figurative jungle of communications choices." 

To borrow the title of William Bennett's new book, we have here "The End
of Outrage." A giant corporation, swimming in profits, decides that
nothing is sacred, that commercialism has no limits and publicly boasts
about its dirty deed. And the result: virtually no public condemnation. 

Bell Atlantic has the unmitigated gall to rip an innocent children's story
out of the minds of children, splash it onto television screens,
newspapers, bus shelters, poster and two spectacularly awful billboards in
Times Square and New York's Grand Central Station. And what? We stand here
and take it. What's next? A computerized Bell Atlantic chip implanted
inside the womb to communicate with the developing infant in utero? 

A Bell Atlantic spokesperson said that Sendak rarely gives interviews and
the company refused to give us Sendak's phone number. We have no clue why
Sendak did what he did. But Bell Atlantic showed no restraint and it
should be condemned for this sacrilege. 

Disney's commercialism, its corrupt awfulness open for all to see, is one
thing. Maurice Sendak is quite another. There was in his stories a purity,
an innocence, an honesty that Bell Atlantic has strip-mined forever. Can
we ever read again Where the Wild Things Are to our children without
thinking of our telephone bill? 

We must take care to preserve whatever private spaces we have left for
non-commercial, non-market values. And we must push back against corporate
greed to re-create the spaces we have lost. 

Why? Because if we don't care, we end up like Pierre. 

It was Maurice Sendak's Pierre who always said, "I don't care." 

"Good morning darling boy," his mother told Pierre, "you are my only joy." 

Pierre said "I don't care." 

"What would you like to eat?" his mother asked. 

"I don't care," said Pierre. 

"Some lovely cream of wheat?" his mother asked. 

"I don't care." 

He kept saying I don't care until his parents just left him there, and he
was visited by the lion. 

The lion asked Pierre if he would like to die. Pierre said, "I don't
care." 

So, the lion ate Pierre. 

Moral of the story: care. 

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor.

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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