Like Battery Acid through Courduroy

Well, if you had told me when I woke up this morning that today I would read a sentence starting "When I first came up with the idea for the Pet Rock," I would not have believed you. But then you would have been proven right, and I would have marveled at your powers of prognostication.

I read this sentence in Advertising for Dummies, which I picked up today in the beginning of what I hope will become a massive attack on corporate culture executed via reading their own materials and critiquing them.

Much to my delight, Advertising for Dummies employs - without the slightest hint of irony - quotes in the chapter introductions that tend to be virulently anti-advertising. For example, chapter 1: "Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising" - Mark Twain. Or, chapter 4: "Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it." - Stephen Butler Leacock. Or, chapter 9: "I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree./ Indeed, unless the billboards fall/I'll never see a tree at all." - Ogden Nash. This all leads me to a question, namely, does this guy (and hell, everyone who works in advertising) sleep soundly at night? Does he realize that he works in a business which depends on people being manipulated and often spending money they don't have on crap they don't need or probably even want?

As much as I go on about how much everything sucks, there's still a big part of me that's just surprised all the time at the human race.