Not long ago, our small local newspaper printed this letter of mine:
In your issue of Thursday, December 3, you asked for opinions on whether you should run that "physic ad". Please forgive me for my longwinded approach to answering your question but I hadn't heard that word physic for many years. I doubt that I've ever seen it in print -- but it brought to mind
The Famous Physic.
When I was a young boy I did not like breakfasts. My mother, being a concerned parent who wanted her child to start the day right, was also resourceful. She'd tell table tales to distract me from the tribulation of eating dropped eggs on toast. Mom also knew I liked to hear funny yarns and this special one was a story of how she, as a seven-year-old, discovered the physic Exlax.
Many folks nowadays don't know about this laxative that looked and tasted like a miniature Hershey chocolate bar. In those days, she'd tell me, the Exlax folks were trying to advertise their product. To do that they'd hand out samples to all the neighborhood druggists and the druggists would, in turn, place several of them in a small bowl on the counter of their soda fountain. Most drugstores in those days had soda fountains.
On this special day, as I loved to hear her tell it, this little city girl -- my mother -- had to run to the corner drugstore on an errand for my grandmother. Since Mom had the added chore of keeping an eye on her younger brother, my uncle Leo, the two of them trekked several city blocks away, hand in sticky hand.
Well, she'd say, that bowl of chocolate samples was just too hard for a child to resist. When the druggist had his back turned she helped herself to a few squares. Naturally, being the vigilant custodian of my uncle Leo, she helped herself to a couple squares for him too.
She wished that the story ended there. Being a city girl, she'd proceed, means you live in a city -- a city with many corner drugstores. And the Exlax folks did so well on the flavoring of those little chocolate squares that my mother and her little brother decided to visit all of the drugstores in their neighborhood.
I'd always ask Mom, when she got to that point in her story, "What happened next?".
"Well" -- she'd feign a grimace with hands on both hips and then with a huff, "and we didn't get home any too soon!"
***
Well, Brenda, I'm sure by now you've found that the keyboard gremlins took your intended word psychic and slyly scrambled it into physic.
I suspect the issue here is, all fun aside, whether you should accept advertising from an entity that represents principles that violate a religious belief of you and many of your readers. That issue is as old and as complicated as what we call freedom of the press. So old and precious that our country was founded on principles like that one freedom. Yet so complicated that the courts are still divided and the public debates remain heated over precisely what printed and graphic material we should allow our brethren and children to be exposed to in the media. So complicated, Brenda, that your decision may boil down to being a business one. Will the revenue from this ad be offset by the lost revenue from folks who cancel their subscriptions to your newspaper?
While I've never spent a penny to call one of those psychic hot lines or answered any of those spiritual advisor advertisements, the ads by themselves don't offend me. You may want to look at the checkout stand of your local supermarket. Here, if you can spot a tabloid like The National Enquirer then you can deduce how that store manager dealt with his own business decision. That tabloid is brimming with such advertisements.
"One of the greatest desires of man is freedom of the mind -- which is fortunate, since there is an equally great one to squelch it". Author unknown.
