Back when cigarette smoking was much more prevalent, still cool and not as sneered upon by society, there was a commercial often shown in movie theaters, oddly enough.  Before the movie started you’d have a jolly ad designed to drive you to the concession stand to buy fantastically expensive drinks, popcorn and candy.

Then, in a quick companion commercial, two Bic lighters would walk stiffly up to each other on the giant screen, poised like two rectangular plastic erections.  As each spoke the top of their metallic head would burst into flame.   The ad’s tagline was a jaunty “flick my Bic!”, and the distinct cadence of “suck my dick!” was not lost on any of the fifth grade boys in the audience.

I think not of the geniuses who came up with that memorable ad campaign but of the French genius capitalist who first realized you don’t need to make fine products that people will own with pride and take care of.   His breakthrough, which led to a vast fortune, was understanding that you could make a lot more money selling cheap disposable plastic pieces of shit to people increasingly addicted to convenience.  

Bic pens, a revolutionary skipping ballpoint refill in a clear plastic tube, were crap, sold by the billions, used briefly and simply tossed into landfill — no problem.  Bic later made disposable razors, sold a billion of them in no time.   Ditto the Bic you could flick, hold up flaming at the end of the concert to ask for an encore — when its fuel was done, toss it into the gutter.  You could flick all the Bics, actually.   Soon every capitalist in competition with Bic was making disposable products out of the cheapest plastic they could find — the race was on.    Sixty years later it’s hard to buy a pen, or anything else, that’s not disposable.

The philosophy was incredibly simple, liberating and lucrative.  Use the disposable piece of crap a few times and don’t worry about it — no need to refill or reuse it — just toss it in the garbage when it’s done and take the next brand new one from the pack.   Life is too short to be sentimental or worry about a future featuring millions of tons of indestructible plastic in landfills and oceans, or the loss of a sense of design, craft or pride in one’s product!

I would like to go back in a time machine to meet this genius, Marcel Bich, in much the same way, when I was ten, I used to fantasize about meeting Hitler.   Not to shake his hand, you understand.

The old Brooklyn baseball fan’s dilemma:  you are in an elevator with Stalin, Hitler and Walter O’Malley, the guy who moved the Dodgers from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to LA.  You have a gun with only two bullets, what do you do?

Answer:  shoot O’Malley twice, make sure he’s dead.

Unfair joke, really, since it turns out O’Malley did everything possible to keep the team in Brooklyn — he got screwed by Robert Moses, an evil bastard who probably deserves to be in that elevator more than O’Malley does —  and finally took the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles rather than give in to Moses and relocate to Queens.

But I digress, and although it’s probably just as unfair to blame Marcel Bich for the devastation his billion dollar idea led to, I can only say:

Fleek my Beek, Baron Bich.

from Wolfgang Saxon’s 1994 NY Times obit:

Baron Marcel Bich, whose inexpensive Bic disposable pens, lighters and razors made him wealthy enough to sustain an 11-year quest for the America’s Cup, died on Monday in Paris. He was 79 and lived in suburban Neuilly-sur-Seine.

After fixing up a leaky shed in Clichy, a northern Paris suburb, after World War II, Baron Bich and a partner, Edouard Buffard, began turning out inexpensive penholders and pencil cases. Later he obtained the patent rights to a ball-point pen invented by a Hungarian, Ladislas Biro, and formed Societe Bic in 1953. (The baron’s name and the pen’s are pronounced beek in French.)

The inexpensive pens proved irresistible to consumers, beginning with the French. The corporation rapidly expanded, with factories in many countries turning out billions of pens sold singly or by the carton. Later he produced disposable razors and lighters. Annual Sales of $1.1 Billion