Thumper in Jerusalem

I've been enjoying some of the super-long 1960s New Yorker article-cum-books that are hidden in the DVD set I got last year for Christmas—this week it's Truman Capote; before that it was Hannah Arendt. The tradeoff for having to read 'em on the computer screen is that the lovely timeless prose is interleaved with the very ephimeral ads of the day—it's amazing how differently they wrote and paced ad copy and chose suitable illustrations back in the day. So I was reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and learning about the banality of evil and the banality of Bergdorf-Goodman's clothing sketches, when I came to the following full-pager (The New Yorker, May 16, 1963, p. 87):



That headline reads: "New Inner Circle is for women with delicate skin". Here's the ad copy:




I remember the 1980s and 90s anti-vivisection campaigns directed at cosmetics companies testing on rabbits* — unearthing yet another ugly secret from the beauty industry, with the clutch photo being of a lab rabbit with harspray in its rheumy taped-open eyes. What's amazing about this ad (aside from its ironic placement in of a history of individuals designing and perpetrating exceedingly evil acts against other people, many under the impression that they were doing something for the greater "good")** is that the cosmetics bunny isn't the secret, she's the salesman. This is definitely of the pre-Vietnam, all-trusting era: "you know we'd never hurt this bunny with our products, ergo our product will never hurt you".

* How much was it the cuteness that made it seem so awful? I don't know that rabbits are more deserving of protection or outrage-on-behalf than rats or mice.

** I actually think this irony may be less than it seems. There's an unfortunate temptation to equate cruelty/misuse of people with that of animals. I think they're both awful, but are by no means the same — and indeed a blurring of the human/animal distinction has historically, I think, tended to make it easier to be cruel people more than it's made it harder to be cruel to animals. Great minds and men may disagree (didn't Gandhi say something about it?) but that's my hunch.