One of the most comically absurd catalogs in our nation’s history is SkyMall, which has featured a kitty cat drinking fountain, a life-size garden statue of Bigfoot, a Night Glow Toilet Seat, a Wine Glass Holder Necklace, a Talking Smurf Toothbrush, a Dog Dung Vacuum Cleaner, and Justin Bieber mint-flavored dental floss. The catalog has entertained airline passengers who were desperate for a diversion as they waited for interminably long periods on the runway until air traffic control gave the pilot the okay for takeoff.
The SkyMall has featured thousands of products too preposterous for any sane human being to contemplate buying. But if you want to distill the SkyMall catalog to its very essence of absurdity, you must look to Safe-T Man, a six-foot-tall air-inflatable dummy targeted for single women who need a “companion” when sitting alone at home or driving in their car. Safe-T Man was being marketed as protection, a dummy so lifelike that potential predators would be warded off.
The dummy arrived at your doorstep naked. You had to dress it according to your sartorial tastes. In the SkyMall photo, the dummy is dressed in a brown faux leather jacket, baseball cap, and mirror sunglasses, giving it the vague resemblance of an undercover cop.
It’s difficult to know how many people bought Safe-T Man. Nor can we know the motivation for purchasing such a dummy. Some purchases may have been made in the earnest pursuit of safety. Some purchases may have been made for the ironic bragging rights of owning such a ludicrous male simulacrum. Some purchases may have been made to use Safe-T Man as a fraudulent passenger so that one could speed down the carpool lane.
To seek comfort, security, and companionship from Safe-T Man is indeed to be gullible, just as it is to seek culinary greatness by baking a Mock Apple Pie.
But gullibility is only part of the problem. We’re talking about something far more self-destructive. We’re talking about a way of life. When we study the idea of trying to create a façade of protection by keeping in close proximity to Safe-T Man, we enter the portal of the type of people who seek false solutions to their problems and by doing so evidence a strong degree of gullibility, desperation, and stunted self-awareness.
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