Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

BEARING TESTIMONY: MORE THAN 140 WORDS ON 12 YEARS A SLAVE

Slavery has been called America's original sin. And in an era where the official occupants of the White House are an African-American family, partly descended from slaves, it may seem easy for many Americans to pat themselves on the back. Look how far we've come, they'll say. They're right, but only partly.

Like Lady Macbeth, the United States will never completely rub the blood off its hands. Nor should it try. Americans' duty is certainly not to pay for the sins of its fathers, just as Germans are not responsible for Nazi crimes against Jews and others. But Americans, like Germans, do have an important responsibility to uphold.

Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel writes: "The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened . . . You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish."

But Wiesel is only half right. The survivor's burden to bear testimony ought to be shared with the children of the perpetrators who must freely acknowledge the crimes committed by their ancestors so that, together, descendants of the victims and criminals can ensure atrocities like this never happen again.

How do you acknowledge such monstrous crimes? The best way, it seems to me, is through the power of stories, told generation after generation, that can teach and remind us of man's inhumanity, so no one forgets.

Twelve Years A Slave is this testimonial story for our own generation. The film, written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, is a fictionalized adaptation of the 1853 autobiography by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. Twelve Years would have been a great film if it had simply focused on the crimes of Southern slave owners and their sadistic underlings. But what makes it so memorable and powerful are the complex portrayals of the slaves who, broken and paralyzed with existential fear, could do nothing to stop the barbarism yet still managed to survive.

Some have wondered, immersed in the luxury of their comfortable, democratic 21st century life, why Jews "let themselves" be herded off to concentration camps without much of a fight and how, once there, they didn't rebel against the much smaller number of Nazis who ran these slaughterhouses. Embarrassingly, the same thought crossed my mind as I watched scenes in this movie in which slaves might have, at any given moment, torn their slavemasters to bits and taken over whole plantations.

But enslaved blacks knew, as Jews did in Germany and Eastern Europe, that the system was nearly hopelessly stacked against them and that, even if they achieved some small temporary victory, armies and the law would find them guilty. Even when there seemed to be a chance to escape, there never really was. The South was a prison, a gulag, and blacks knew they were trapped. Even for men like Northup who eventually managed to escape, there was no justice. The men who kidnapped him never had their own freedom taken away from them.

When stupid white men today demean blacks, call them lazy, monkey, n*gger, even question their legitimacy as real Americans, or when they ask how long whites have to be subjected to black "whining" about slavery, they reveal how ignorant they are of America's greatest crime and why the testimonial power of stories like 12 Years A Slave is still so important.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON COURAGE

"Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all."

-- Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath

A DIRECT MAIL TEST BROUGHT TO YOU BY MALCOLM GLADWELL.

In Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, And The Art of Battling Giants, he describes something that ought to give pause to direct marketing experts everywhere.

Gladwell discusses the world's shortest intelligence test, called the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). Through three questions, it assesses individuals' ability to suppress an intuitive and spontaneous wrong answer in favor of a reflective and deliberative right one through the use of brain teasers like this one:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

Many of us (like me) would be tempted to answer that the ball costs 10¢. But, upon further reflection, this is wrong because if the bat is supposed to cost $1 more than the ball, the bat would then cost $1.10, which would total $1.20, not $1.10. The right answer is that the ball is 5¢. (5¢ + $1.05 = $1.10.)

Anyway, the CRT is extremely hard -- MIT students average 2.18 answers out of three, Harvard students average 1.43 correct answers.

But, Gladwell explains, two psychologists at Princeton University found an interesting way to raise people's CRT test scores: they made the test harder. The researchers printed out the test questions in a hard-to-read font: 10% gray 10-point italics, so it looked like this:

See how hard this is to read?

The average score went from 1.9 to 2.45. In other words, making the test harder to read, participants were suddenly scoring better than the brainiest students at MIT.

The researchers concluded that the reason test scores skyrocketed was because, by making the test so hard to read, it forced students to pay more attention to what they were reading.

Researcher Adam Alter says: "[The students had to] think more deeply about whatever they come across... If they have to overcome a hurdle, they'll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder."

This begs a really interesting question for direct marketers who spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out ways to make it easier for readers (i.e., prospective customers) to read what we're trying to sell them.

I don't know if I'm suggesting that we start printing direct mail letters and emails in 10% gray but someone with a healthy budget for her next campaign and some cojones should try it and see the results.

RISE AND FALL: MORE THAN 140 WORDS ON 'GRAVITY'

No one enjoys falling -- whether it's down a flight of stairs, out of a tree or off a mountain. But if there's one thing the force of gravity ensures, it's that sooner or later, no matter how high we climb, we fall.

In Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón's spectacular new film 'Gravity', Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts contending with a freak accident above the Earth and fighting the awesome force of gravity to stay alive. It's also the story of a grieving mother climbing as high as she possibly can to escape a fall she must sooner or later come to terms with.

And, I believe, Gravity is about a still greater fall  -- that of our unsustainable civilization. It's really about the Tower of Babel we've built over the last 10,000 years, about the destruction we've wrought on the planet and the reality we must face that, sooner or later, no matter what flag we plant on the moon or distant planet -- American, Russian or Chinese -- gravity is inexorably bringing it and us down.

While this all may sound ominous and depressing -- spoiler alert! -- the film ends on a high note with an epic fall landing us back where we belong and where, stumble as we may at first, gravity will never keep us from getting back up.