Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 14:32:40 -0700

Dearest Micheline and Tony:

Here's some more information.

Much love

Lea

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PLEASE POST

Dear Ilena:

As a follow-on to Lea's email about lobbyists and the media, I'm sending you this somewhat humorous piece that a friend of mine came up with yesterday after reading hers. Actually, it's not as humorous as it seems at first reading, and does offer a sage prescription for the future.

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"Spin is the art of selling something that nobody wants. It can be a facial cream that turns you green, a used car with sawdust in the engine, a pair of plastic boobs, or a surtax on carrot cake. Government flecks do it. Corporations prosper by it. Media people eat it. Universities teach it. They who master "spin" are called "spin doctors". The most gifted ones become mutual fund promoters. The mediocre ones become plastic surgeons. All others join the government.

Spin doctors are gregarious. They belong to societies. They hold symposia and publish learned treatises. They attend one another's parties, which explains why so many government flecks look and sound like plastic surgeons. For outstanding achievements, they bestow honorary titles upon one another, for example, the Order of Bre-X and the Fellowship of the Fat Lip. Upon retirement, the very good ones get Senate appointments in Canada if they are related to governors general, or White House appointments in the United States if they are related to presidential advisers. All others receive a gold-plated Timex watch, a photograph of Ronald Reagan, and a six-dollar discount voucher to apply to the price of a face lift or new boobs...which brings me to today's lesson on spin.

Plastic surgery would not be where it is today without spin doctors. Man takes about seven years to learn from his mistakes and seven years to unlearn so that he can repeat them for seven more. Women take a little longer to learn, but their mistakes leave more lasting impressions. This is why fads, fashions and wars come and go over a cycle of about twenty years. What is learned by a generation can be taught to the next, but what is unlearned is lost. It must be learned anew from the same mistakes.

Good spin doctors can change all that. By skilfully teaching and unteaching to buck the natural trends, they can cause the cycle to repeat sooner, which explains why political parties change and why breast implants return at intervals of about ten years. If a fib is told often enough and loudly enough, it ultimately becomes the truth, or at least looks like it, and thus many people think it is. This is what drives the breast implant fad. There is so much folklore that nobody, except women who have had implants, knows exactly what they are like. Even daughters don't believe their mums.

The implant mania comes and goes every ten years. Another generation of young women embrace the fad to swell the ranks of the previously wounded. What is different now is that there are so many, and they include a cross-section of society from the modest to the sophisticated. There are writers, teachers, editors, entertainers, media people, and probably a few spin doctors too. We need to enlist their help. Perhaps they can "counterspin" so that the ten-year injury cycle is stopped, or at least slowed.

With the Internet and all the hoop-la of modern communications, it should be possible to discover where some of those people are. Like many of us, they are injured and depressed but they might have good ideas and valuable skills. How about a concentrated effort to get their help for a campaign to prevent our daughters from meeting the same fate as our wives?"

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Thank you

David Evans