A brief observation, today, on the ways in which Madison Avenue controls our lives.

(Brief aside: does anyone know if Madison Avenue, New York that is, is still the epicentre of advertising? It’s become a cliché like Detroit—even though very few cars are actually made in the city of Detroit itself, Detroit and the American automobile are still eponymous.)

I was discussing (via email, natch, does anyone ever really talk over coffee anymore?) concepts of cleanliness with a few friends today. It reminded me of the old Southern putdown—calling someone a “scrubber”. A scrubber is someone who keeps his or her house obsessively clean, and in the South this is considered laughable. The implication is that you have no breeding and don’t have “nice things” (read: pretty old family silver and china and furniture) and make up for the lack with insane cleanliness.

In the North and Midwest, cleanliness is a matter of great pride. In the South, we don’t mind six inches of cat hair under the sofa as long as the family silver is kept to what the USMC would call a “high degree of shine”. Many years ago my mother was entertaining at lunch and, since it was summertime and I was home from college, I got pressed into unofficial butler service. One of the ladies at Mother’s levee was a recent arrival to Maryland; she’d just gotten off the turnip truck from Kansas or some such place a few months before and was a little fluttery at going to lunch in what must have looked like a roomful of Hollywood “Old Southern Biddy” typecasts. I heard the poor woman attempting to praise someone who was not in attendance: “Oh, and Jane, you could just eat off her floors!” My mother raised her eyebrows. “I’m sure you could, Marietta”, she replied, “but why on earth would you want to?”

As our nation devolves further and further away from the gentility of its origins, we measure our worth in cleanliness instead of class. Women that once obsessed over the proper way to set a table now couldn’t care less about matching patterns as long as everything has been properly fumigated.

Enter the ad boys. When the scrubbing frenzy entered in the 1920s, along with nattering public health officials, sanitation specialists and their ilk, the odor of clean was chemical. Hence Lysol—if the chemical smell was enough to knock out a prize bull at thirty paces, it must be clean. Eventually, people grew tired of equating cleanliness with singed nostril hair, and the ‘50s gave us Pine-Sol and its brethren. Problem with Pine-Sol is that it doesn’t make me feel clean, it makes me want to have a drink, because it smells like bad gin. Wonder if the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s ever thought about THAT one.
Since the nice DuPont and Dow people never quite got the piney smell just right, and a lot of people hated it anyway, the next Clean Smell down the line was lemon. All through my childhood and early adulthood, Lemon=Clean. Seventies ad moms drew a pretty red fingernail over a blond wood surface to show how Lemon Pledge didn’t streak; Eighties yuppie wives exclaimed over the Lemon Cascade’s effect on their Waterford crystal. Everyone, it seems, likes the smell of lemon, so that one worked out.

Unfortunately, this left the Clean Industry with nothing new to spring on people, and it hit a rut. Last year or so, they’ve decided to tell us that another citrus fruit is really clean. Now the odor of purity is orange.

Orange??? Makes me think of the acres of melted Dreamsicles in the balcony of the Town Theatre in Fayette street. Worse, it makes me think of urinal candy in sleazy bars all over the place. All the same, the admen have done their job, and in the five ‘n tens and supermarkets, I see more and more people buying “Fresh Orange” dish soap and “Orange Sparkle” window cleaner. If the Moslem terrorists really knew what they were doing, they’d surreptitiously get us all hooked on honeysuckle-scented cleaning fluid and watch as the killer bees destroyed us all.

Should anyone ever (this is highly unlikely, mind you) tells me that my floor is clean enough to eat from, I am going to throw his sandwich on the floor and tell him to go for it.