by Akim Reinhardt

Are you savvy?

I like to think I’m savvy. I’m 57, I’ve seen a lot. Not, I joined the Foreign Legion and traveled the world, seen a lot. More like, I’ve lived a while, and have tried to keep my eyes open along the way.

I can’t predict the future any better than anyone else, which is to say, not at all. I’m not out to get one over on anybody. And I may or may not be wise, which is probably savvy-adjacent, but also definitely different. So when I say I think I’m savvy, mostly I mean that I’m not a chump. I rarely get taken anymore, and on the odd occasions when I do, I usually know it’s happening, but just sigh and go along with it, passively if not actively.

I’m also savvy enough to know that I might actually be quite the chump without realizing it. After all, big chumps don’t know they’re chumps. And even if I’m not much of a chump now, I can look back and see that I was much chumpier when I was younger, embarrassingly so in some cases. I can also look forward and know that as people enter their senior years, their critical faculties decline, at least to some degree, exposing them to all kinds of nonsense. There’s a reason scammers target the elderly, and I’m not that far off from being in their sites.

But for now, I think I mostly have my shit together. You wanna fuck with me? Fuck you.

Here’s an example in the form of a recently posed question: “Ever go to Trader Joe’s on a Saturday morning?”

No. Absolutely not. Never. I generally avoid Trader Joe’s and haven’t been inside one in about a decade. They’re invariably located out in the ‘burbs and their parking lots are notoriously under capacity. I’m a city boy; I just walk to my neighborhood markets. Plus, here in my corner of Maryland, supermarkets are not allowed to sell alcohol. Remove cheap wine from the TJ equation, and the place is about as special as a white t-shirt. Drive out to a faceless suburb on a weekend morning so I can fight for parking and stand-in-line with a basket of mediocre groceries sporting supposedly clever titles? You’ve gotta be kidding.

And just like that, I felt like my answer to the question, which opens Mara Einstein’s new book, marked me as savvy.

But as I made my way through Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults, my unease began to deepen.

It’s not that I slowly realized, despite my cynicism, I actually am like one of the black, silhouetted sheep on the book’s front cover. I’m really not. My misanthropy, stubbornness, and asceticism pretty much inoculate me from such bovid behavior. FFS, I still have a flip phone.

No, it was something else. Read more »