the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

Lesson #2
ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE
how thomas edison invented trash talk
Why would one of America’s iconic inventors publicly
electrocute a full- grown carnival elephant? The answer
reveals a little- known story of ego, failure, and the moment
when America began “going negative.”
LONG BEFORE THE provocative multimedia weenie- wagging between
marketplace rivals Coke and Pepsi, Burger King and McDonald’s,
and Visa and American Express, inventor Thomas Alva Edison was pioneering
the loathsome and now common art known as “going negative”—
the use of modern media and trash-talking surrogates to smear your chief
competitor.
But the story of Edison’s extended public-relations campaign
against his rivals to electrify the world is so bizarre, so spectacularly misguided,
that the failure of Edison’s effort is underscored every time an
American homeowner today flips a light switch or plugs in a vacuum
cleaner. Worse, Edison managed to preserve forever the saddest chapter
of the whole sorry episode—the one a biographer dubbed “America’s longest
and most splenetic howl of corporate outrage”—in a one-minute motion
picture whose title perfectly echoes the unsubtle way in which Edison
conducted the campaign. The enduring 1903 snuff fi lm Electrocuting an
Elephant offers proof that, in matters of judgment, the great man really
wasn’t all that smart.