Category Archive 'Superbowl Ads'

06 Feb 2017

This Year’s Superbowl Propaganda Fest

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John Nolte is perfectly correct: “Liberals eventually ruin everything.” Last night’s Superbowl featured a series of political propaganda advertising spots.

Coke and Airbnb competed in the nausea-inducing sweepstakes with ads extolling the beauties of “diversity.”

84 Lumber, whose first ad, featuring a Mexican mother and daughter dismayed at confronting Trump’s Wall, was declined by Fox as “too controversial,” ran a minute-and-a-half spot titled “The Journey Begins,” showing the same mother and daughter starting out hopefully and passing through desert, river, and mountains in the direction of El Norte, presumably in search of the land of the generous welfare check.

Audi, as Jack Baruth explicated at length, served up a lesson on the natural superiority of the community of fashion, cloaked as a lecture on Feminism.

All in all, the amount of political virtue-signalling from big, ugly fat cat corporations was simply appalling. Yesterday was one of those days where you wondered if the citizens of Hitler’s Germany were as much bombarded with get-in-line, Gleichschaltung prop as we are.

Liberal “diversity” is such a crock. I’m old enough to remember 1950s America very well. People, like myself, living outside the big cities and the South, never ran into people of other races at all, but we still had plenty of diversity. Go watch one of those old war movies in which the soon-to-be-embattled platoon is shown to be made up of the farmboy from Kansas, the guy with the thick Brooklyn accent, the strong Polack, the ready-with-his-fists Irishman, and the intellectual Jew. My own small town had a population pretty much only made up of turn-of-the-last-century Roman Catholic immigrants, and we still had more than enough diversity to fuel all the mutual dislike anybody needs.

In the old days, newly arrived immigrants came to America, lived in enclaves of their own, and took the worst jobs. Today, some Hindu or Mussulman hops of the plane from Bombay and sends his offspring to Harvard or Yale. The first generation in the country does not line up to work with a pick and shovel in the coal mines, to lay track for the railroads, or to do the heavy lifting in the mill. That first generation can be found teaching the US Constitution (from a left-wing point of view) at Yale Law School (Akhil Amar) or telling Americans what to think about Foreign Policy on CNN (Fareed Zakaria).

No wonder so many people are experiencing a wave of Nativist revulsion. Suddenly, it’s the turn of every personage of color from every remote continent or clime to be welcomed heartily to America, and granted immediate entrée to the national establishment in a way that it was never the turn of Scots Irish who’ve been living here for centuries or the Germans or the Scandinavians or the Irish and Southern and Eastern Roman Catholics who arrived somewhat later. Those people are never counted as diverse, and simply get lectured to by their betters and advised to apology for their white privilege.

04 Feb 2017

Hermeneutics of an Audi Commercial

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Jack Baruth, at The Truth About Cars, explains the real message of Audi’s Superbowl commercial.

At first blush, the spot seems to be nothing but the usual corporate slacktivism, a feel-good fluff-vertorial making a “brave stand” in support of an issue that was decided long ago. I’m reminded of Joaquin Phoenix’s brilliant portrayal of Commodus in Gladiator, arriving in full armor as soon as he can do so without any risk. “Father, have I missed the battle?” Well, Audi, you’ve missed the war; if there’s a place in the United States where women are actually paid significantly less for doing the same job as men, it’s not evident from what I’m reading.

After watching the one-minute advertisement carefully, however, I understood feminism, or equal pay, is the last thing Audi wants you to take away from it. The message is far subtler, and more powerful, than the dull recitation of the pseudo-progressive catechism droning on in the background. This spot is visual — and as you’ll see below, you can’t understand it until you watch it and see what it’s really telling you. …

I think you’ve figured out what the real message of this Audi advertisement is, but just in case you’ve been napping I will spell it out for you: Money and breeding always beat poor white trash. Those other kids in the race, from the overweight boys to the hick who actually had an American flag helmet to the stripper-glitter girl? They never had a chance. They’re losers and they always will be, just like their loser parents. Audi is the choice of the winners in today’s economy, the smooth talkers who say all the right things in all the right meetings and are promoted up the chain because they are tall (yes, that makes a difference) and handsome without being overly masculine or threatening-looking.

At the end of this race, it’s left to the Morlocks to clean the place up and pack the derby cars into their trashy pickup trucks, while the beautiful people stride off into the California sun, the natural and carefree winners of life’s lottery. Audi is explicitly suggesting that choosing their product will identify you as one of the chosen few. I find it personally offensive. As an owner of one of the first 2009-model-year Audi S5s to set tire on American soil, yet also as an ugly, ill-favored child who endured a scrappy Midwestern upbringing, I find it much easier to identify with the angry-faced fat kids in their home-built specials or the boy with the Captain America helmet.

At the end, what does this ad do? It just reinforces our natural biases. Poor is bad, rich is good, and most importantly, rich people deserve their fortune because they are inherently better than the rest of us. You might not like that message, but it’s been selling cars for a very long time. If Audi wanted to try some authentic activism, they might consider showing us an African-American man or woman who overcame a tough upbringing to become an actual customer, or perhaps a differently-abled person who’s achieved enough to buy himself an S8 as a reward for his hard work. But that’s not terribly aspirational, is it? Who wants to be those people? And, by the same token, who wouldn’t want to be that handsome father lifting his beautiful daughter out of someone else’s winning race car?

05 Feb 2014

I Did Not Like That Coke Superbowl Ad

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I was sitting, reading a book on my eReader, yesterday over at Hunter’s Garage in Warriors Mark, waiting for new lights to be installed on the plow on my Ford pickup, so that the old truck could get its Pennsylvania inspection sticker, and my eye fell on a large box sitting on the office floor, which was labeled “horno de microonda”* and “sobre la gama.”** It also had a manufacturer’s name, but the identity of its contents was indicated to Americans in Central Pennsylvania entirely in Spanish.

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* “horno de microonda” = microwave oven — ** “sobre la gama” = over the range

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These days, you can’t purchase pretty much any product or appliance which doesn’t come with labeling and directions provided in Spanish and French with English looking like an afterthought alternative.

When I used the ATM machine in the local supermarket in Purcellville, Virginia, I used to find it mildly irritating that I had to specifically choose English as the language the transaction was going to be conducted in, ruling out choices like Vietnamese and Russian.

I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing that George Babbitt is making an effort to accommodate the needs of immigrants and visiting foreigners in American commerce, but I do think that the convenience and natural expectation of native-born citizens that our own national language would represent the default position ought to be respected.

There has been a good deal of discussion the last couple of days about language and legitimate expectation in connection with the Superbowl ad aired by Coca Cola, in which “America the Beautiful” was sung in nine different languages (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Senegalese-French, Keres (a spectacularly obscure Amerindian language spoken in some of the Pueblos of New Mexico)… and English, which additionally featured (take that, reactionaries!) an interracial homosexual couple complete with adopted child.

Sanctimonious libs loved the ad for its alleged celebration of “diversity.” But their definition of diversity obviously excludes all normal, native-born Americans of European descent (except for about 4 seconds of a token cowboy). The America they find beautiful is the future brown-skinned majority, sexually-perverse, hijab-wearing, Third World-descended America which they are constantly predicting will shortly be replacing that objectionable earlier white, male-dominated, cis-gendered, European-descended oppressive America.

Coke’s America the Beautiful presented a 30-second vision of the American left’s multicuturalist wet dream fantasy, a brave new America composed of newly-arrived immigrants and minorities, dancing in our streets and eating our lunch, while taking self-congratulatory bows for replacing every last iota of pre-1960s American identity with their own, except –of course– for the 4-second-present cowboy at the beginning, who may really be just riding off into the sunset.

How could anyone possibly object? Aren’t we a nation of immigrants after all?

I’d say that the reason some people object is that immigrants today are commonly not what they used to be. When my own grandparents came here, around the turn of the last century, they came to escape the tyranny of the Russian Tsar and were willing to settle for a deal offering them the opportunity to take the most dangerous and unattractive kind of employment, working in the Anthracite coal mines, in return for citizenship and a New World of freedom and opportunity for their posterity.

My grandparents built their own schools and churches, read their own newspapers in their own language, and lived quietly in their own neighborhood. Today’s immigrants commonly expect special linguistic accommodation, special recognition and privileges, a welfare state, and immediate promotion into the American ruling class.

My grandparents wanted only the opportunity to make a living, the prospect of a better life for their children, and to be left alone. The American left seems to think that today’s immigrants deserve to star in Super bowl commercials. They believe the rest of us have an obligation to accommodate, recognize, and celebrate everybody else’s languages and cultures, everybody’s except, of course, for our own, the language and culture of normal native-born Americans of European descent.

Hurrah for Tagalog-speaking Filippinos, for the Senegalese and the Keres-speakers from the Pueblo, three cheers for sodomy, and to hell with the Mayflower descendants, the offspring of the pioneers who cleared the Wilderness and won the West, and screw all the Catholic European ethnics who built the modern industrial America and won the great World Wars.

23 Jan 2011

Fox Rejects “Jesus Hates Obama” Superbowl Ad

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The rejected ad was for a web-site selling mugs, hats, and t shirts. They managed to offend the hyper-sensitive Ann Coulter, but really, I think Fox rejected the ad for the same reason pretty much everbody is going to reject their product offerings: they are just not sufficiently creative or funny enough.

NY Daily News


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