CSotD: Don’t look around for the villains
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Rob Rogers is first off the drawing board with this post-Super Bowl commentary, and I think it's going to be hard to top.
The flap over Coke's commercial has pretty much shunted aside the fact that Cheerios not only brought back their interracial couple, but now with the news that the woman is pregnant. Apparently, either new comment-filtering practices work or the lunatic fringe was too distracted by Coke to even notice the implication that the couple had, y'know, again.
I really like Rogers' cartoon, and I'm glad he responded to the media reports so well.
But, you know, I've got some questions about all this. First, let's set the scene:
For those who missed it — and the fact that you have to own a computer in order to be reading this makes me suspect that's a pretty small group — Coke ran a spot during the Super Bowl that consisted of people singing "America the Beautiful," with each line in a different language.
It was a sweet moment, in the course of which my 17-year-old granddaughter remarked on how many people were going to go ballistic over it. Granted, she makes a hobby of troll-slaying, but the fact is, I had just been thinking the same thing.
And, sure enough, the Intertubes apparently exploded with outrage over the idea that Coke had dramatised the song's prayer that God would "crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea."
But I say the on-line world "apparently exploded with outrage" because it's entirely possible, as was suggested in Frank Rich's "Stop Beating a Dead Fox," which I linked to on this post, that progressive response to these idiotic outbursts gives them far more publicity than they could achieve on their own.
I'm less dismayed, however, by the (apparent) response than by how quickly we both thought, "Boy, this is gonna piss off a lot of people."
Which is to say that, while the extent of actual outrage is "apparent," this is "certain":
A climate of hate and fear has poisoned our world, and it's neither fair, accurate nor helpful to blame it on right-wing lunatics. We gave them permission to crawl out from under their rocks.
We did this to ourselves.
Exhibit A: Never mind the response to this year's Coke commercial. How many times have you heard their 1971 commercial praised, compared to the number of times you're heard it mocked, not by cross-burning xenophobic crazies, but by moderates, even progressives, including perhaps your own friends?
Why blame the right-wing lunatic fringe for a toxic, mean-spirited atmosphere that we welcomed into our world, first in 1971 by claiming to be shocked by Archie Bunker while delightedly quoting him, and then, seven years later, (Exhibit B) by dropping that pretense entirely?
Note that it's tagged "Best Guitar Smash" and that the movie wasn't entitled, for instance, "Rich Preppy Snots."
And we didn't just laugh at that scene.
We also guffawed over the cruel misogyny of pretending to be the boyfriend of a dead girl and over the racism of the trip to the roadhouse, the humor of which relies on the twin assumption that black men are scary and violent and that they are obsessed with having sex with white women.
And we snickered over getting an underaged girl passed-out drunk and then debating whether to have sex with her. That was pretty funny.
Oh, and we snickered over the way the "bad fraternity" shuttled Larry and Kent off to sit with the foreign students and crips. It was funny, because Larry and Kent weren't losers!
In fact, I would invite you to look through this list of favorite quotes from that movie and pretend you didn't know it was the funniest, greatest classic comedy ever filmed.
Pretend, instead, that it had just been released and was being praised by conservative bloggers and chortled over on Facebook by right-wingers.
And then use that filter to ponder all the mean-spirited jokes and memes that have sprung up since, under the banner of "We are such free-spirited breakers of artificial barriers!"
The people who feel free to cut loose on Coke's statement of brotherhood can justify their hateful display in the words of the also-much-mocked anti-drug PSA:
"I learned it from you."
Juxtaposition of the Day
(The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee)
Edison has gone back to 1972, in a new story arc that happened to coincide today with a Foxtrot Classic originally from 2003, which brings up how quickly technology has transformed communication.
As it happens, I had a conversation recently with someone older than the afore-mentioned granddaughter but still young enough not to know about young women sitting by the phone.
Or the idea that families would locate their teenage children by following a phone cord to a closed closet door.
Or that they would attempt — unsuccessfully, for the most part — to institute rules about being off the phone, let's say, from the top of the hour until 10 minutes after, in case someone wanted to get through to another member of the family.
Or needed to call because the car had broken down.
Which is nowhere near as critical as the problem of good magicians attempting to apprehend evil magicians in a world in which all telephones are tethered to cords, as they were in 1941 and well after, (though this vintage Mandrake actually ran several days ago).
It not only changes storytelling, but it makes songs like this even more incomprehensible than they were in 1967.
Irrelevant but amusing trivia: Years ago, My then-wife had a friend and co-worker named Vicky Carr, a brilliant tech writer who had dated a White House fellow some time before. When the co-incidence of her name came up, she would tell of the time she was waiting for the guy to get off work and John Denver arrived at the White House to see Jimmy Carter. He walked into the waiting room and introduced himself.
"Hi, I'm John Denver."
"Hello, I'm Vicky Carr."
"No, I really am John Denver …" and he started to whip out ID.
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