Lately, I have been between spam filters and found that deleting junk e-mail one item at a time can sometimes be instructive. “You can get the watches you’ve dreamed about,” reads the subject line of one of them, prompting the thought: Who the hell dreams about watches? I know that the amount of advertising brainpower that goes into these things is not great. The economics of spam depends entirely upon the assumption of a tiny response rate, which means that the appeals must be frequent, broadcast, and blatant. But you’d think that anyone aware enough of the world around him to know what Breitling or Tag Heuer was would also be aware enough of himself to laugh at a come-on so crude. Or take the one for something called “Hydroderm” whose subject line reads: “Because you deserve to look ten years younger.” Philosophically, that one is a mind-bender. How, exactly, do you get the notion of desert and looking ten years younger into the same sentence? I could understand it if the idea were to promise us something better than we deserve. Orwell said that “at 50, everyone has the face he deserves,” and I don’t suppose that sounds of promise to most people. But how can anyone deserve to look better, let alone younger, than he does?

I suppose the answer is that in the consumer paradise we find ourselves inhabiting, built on psychotherapeutic assumptions, we have grown used to thinking of desert as something that can