by Mark Morford

Created on: November 24, 2008

Girl Scout Confidential/ Of cookies, cuteness, and budding vixens of delicious capitalism

Girl Scout cookies are either the last vestige of innocence and charm and sweet pubescent enchantment on the planet today, or a monstrous sickly marketing ploy designed to spur increased obesity and diabetes and strange groaning noises among colleagues and friends while wide-eyed quasi-virtuous demoiselles bilk millions of innocent bystanders out of three bucks minimum and more like fifteen, as if you have a choice. The little angels.

All the while turning otherwise gentle God-fearin' minivan-piloting parental units into overly enthusiastic and/or visciously competitive marketing lackeys who hawk their daughters' wares without shame at the supermarket and the video store and the office, thus spurring yet another outbreak of general guilt if you deign to resist dumping a few bucks to help send the happy pigtailed troop to summer camp so they can learn to dog-paddle and sing and check up on each others' 'N Sync fetish quotient.

And then the boss passes around a cookie order form at the office for the benefit of his/her youngish saplingette(s) and you're essentially compelled to buy a few dozen boxes of the nasty strangely addictive sugar bombs so as to be a team player and a trooper and a pal and to help teach the young Girl Scout entrepreneurs the most important salesmanship lesson of all.

Which is of course that forced capitalism mixed with equal parts fear and guilt and junk-food vice is a darn fine way to make your way in the world, isn't that right little girl, shhh just don't tell anyone and keep smiling.

Not to mention the magic All-American lesson that getting others to do the work for you and help win you prizes and make you the star will undoubtedly ensure that you kick little Suzie Peterman's butt this year because everyone knows she only won in '07 because her dad's a doctor and got his whole staff to buy a thousand boxes plus her rich grandparents buy like 100 boxes each and live in a Winnebago in Florida and watch Regis 24-7 on satellite while eating cookies all day.

Cuteness sells, that's the message being asseverated here, wholesome cuteness in the service of sustained sugar addiction and I think we're all pretty much suckers for it, somehow attracted to the childhood idea that innocence equals sweets equals love equals a 60% obesity rate and regular insulin shots and a very skewed sense of what's really going on here.

All nicely summed up by a manager who approached the office junk-food repository the other day and found himself face to face with another ungodly stack of cookie boxes left by other over-sugared employees, each box in various stages of mangled consumption and disarray and said manager could only state out loud, "*more* goddamn Girl Scout cookies?!" before plunging in and grabbing a handful of chocolate-coconut samoas and maybe a couple trefoils and marching back to his desk, grumblingly, because you just can't help it.

Damn those little vixens, they'll be the death of us all.

Learn more about this author, Mark Morford.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.