Grotesque Commercials. There are a number of truly horrible, if not literally horrifying, commercials running on U.S. television at present. I pass over, for this purpose only, some Vonage (web telephony) commercials that show people doing stupid things, some of which might, in the footage shown, have caused them real harm.
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(1) Anheuser-Busch. Bud Light has, since Superbowl 2005, been showing a hideous and inhuman commercial in which a skydiving instructor is trying to motivate a scared new jumper to take the plunge by showing him a six-pack of Bud Light bottles, then tossing it out the plane's open door for him to chase after. Instead, the pilot of the plane, who wears no parachute, suddenly runs out from the cockpit and jumps out the open door after the six-pack, in effect both leaping to his death and leaving the two remaining men (instructor and first-time jumper) in a pilotless plane that they will die in unless they jump. That detestable, inhuman ad actually won an award from Michigan State University!
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Everyone who created, approved, and funded that unbearably, intolerably monstrous ad, and everyone who voted to grant that award, should literally be thrown from a plane to their death. I don't misuse the word "literally" to mean "figuratively". They should literally — actually — each and every one of them be thrown from a plane to their death.
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What on Earth were the advertisers thinking? First, tossing heavy beer-filled bottles (or even empty glass bottles) out of a plane would constitute bombing the ground underneath with potentially deadly missiles.
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Second, this hideous commercial trivializes the certain death of a pilot. As I recall, we didn't think the death of the pilots on the various hijacked 9/11 planes was trivial.
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Third, the two men left on board would be killed unless they jumped, when the plane eventually plummeted from the sky. The skydiving instructor plainly would have no problem jumping to safety. But the terrified student? What if he were paralyzed by fear? He'd die. That's supposed to be funny?
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And what of the people who might be hit by a plane falling from the sky — if they hadn't already been killed by bottles falling thousands of feet and achieving massive force in terminal velocity?
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What of the destruction of property, the plane at the least?
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Is any of this supposed to be funny? "Don't try this at home" doesn't cover it.
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(2) Dairy Queen. This despicable company has two detestable commercials being broadcast now, both of which you can see at http://www.dairyqueen.com/en-US/DQ+Ads/default.htm.
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In the first, and far more objectionable, two men die! What fun!
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Two Indian-accented scientists are shown in a laboratory. One comes up to the other with a DQ "Dream Pie blizzard" he is impressed by to tell the other that he must try it. The other is busy making buzzing noises to a "killer bee" visible at a magnifying glass. On inquiry, he says he has learned "to speak bee". The second challenges him: "What possible scientific purpose could that serve?" The first then speaks and gestures to the bee to attack, which it does. The second scientist slaps his neck at the bee that has just stung him, then dies! That is, the first scientist has just deliberately murdered the second, a colleague who in the spirit of friendship came up to him in the first place just to recommend that he try this wonderful new drink!
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Then the first takes the "blizzard" drink away from the dead scientist (I guess robbery is the assumed motive for this murder), then laughs what would ordinarily be a knee-slapping laugh at having murdered his colleague to steal his drink, but his hand hits a bee on the counter, and he dies! The announcer then says of the DQ Dream Pie blizzards, "They're to die for."
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No, they're not.
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Everyone responsible for that ad should be subjected to attack by huge swarms of "killer bees".
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The second offensive Dairy Queen ad features a father trying to teach his bespectacled little boy to shoot hoops by providing him the incentive of heading to DQ if he makes a basket. The kid is hopelessly inept and fails every attempt by the father to make things easier for him. The father actually takes the backboard off the garage wall and holds it mere feet from the kid, whereupon the kid throws the ball hard toward it, but actually hits his father in the face, hard. If you have ever been hit in the face, or pretty much anywhere else, by a basketball, which is not a cream puff, balloon, nor beachball, you know that such an impact would cause serious damage. But the father withstands that accident with no harm and merely tells the kid, impatiently, as tho he is merely a tad annoyed rather than stunned and injured physically, "Just get in the car."
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What messages are we subjected to here? Kids with glasses are incompetents who deserve our contempt? You can throw a basketball hard into a person's face without doing any damage whatsoever? What? Is being hit in the face with a basketball supposed to be funny? I don't find it so.
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(3) Red Bull. A caffeinated "energy drink" originally from Austria has invaded the U.S. market with noxious and barely comprehensible, crudely animated commercials that tell viewers that drinking it will give them "wiiings".
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One of those commercials features an apparent low-level Mafia hitman phoning his capo from a public phone on "dock 13" about a problem he has encountered in trying to drown a man the capo apparently told him to kill. It seems the would-be victim requested as his last wish a can of Red Bull, and even tho the professional killer encased his feet in concrete and threw him into deep water off a dock, he kept popping up above the water level, then flew off on the "wiiings" that Red Bull gave him.
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Isn't that charming? Mafia killers set a man's feet in concrete and throw him into the ocean to die! What fun! Let's see how much fun the creators and funders of this ad find that to be when we encase their own feet in concrete and throw them off a pier to drown.
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(4) Grand Theft Auto (and Other Toxic "Games"). Violent ads are also running for the hyperviolent (and, we recently discovered, secretly pornographic) video game "Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas", which glorifies crime — specifically mass murder, of men by women as much as of women by men or men by men — all as entertainment for America's youth.
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This is, alas, not the only evil video game poisoning the minds of (young) people in many countries, but it is the most prominent here, now.
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Every form of murder shown in that evil "game" should be turned into a form of execution for its conceptual creators, programmers, and marketers, and of the executives of the companies that pour that toxic waste into public waters of the mind.
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The four commercials hilited above are not alone in their monstrousness. Every day we are assailed by astounding evil in media that I call "entertainment for Nazis", and we pretend that it's just make-believe, so has no effect.
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But there is no such thing as visual fiction. We are programmed by nature to heed everything we see and everything we hear as being absolutely real.
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We could not have survived the challenges to our animal nature in a hostile world if we second-guessed our senses. No, we have to accept everything we see and every auditory cue we hear, and react to it immediately, lest we die from discounting a danger or missing an opportunity that might be our last chance to survive in a harsh environment.
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That's the way our species has evaded danger and pursued prey for millennia. Some part of our primitive brain believes every single thing we see and every single thing we hear to be absolutely true.
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When we are assailed by graphic, deviant violence, we necessarily and inescapably believe some part of it. It is sophistry to pretend that we can discount all of it and be unaffected.
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People who immerse themselves in violent fantasies accept some part of them as true. Even if it were only 1/100th or even 1/1,000th of 1% for each exposure, multiply that by thousands and thousands of exposures, hours of immersion in a fantasy world that seems real and complete, and you see that people are ineluctably poisoned by such nitemare images and moral constructs — death is funny! violence is normal and normative; human life means nothing — to the point that they are hardened against human suffering, and come to believe, subintellectually, in the gut, that the world is a deadly dangerous place where everybody is out to kill you, so you had better be prepared to kill them first.
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If al-Qaeda offered "games" like Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas, as training materials for potential soldiers in its unconventional army, would we regard them as "games" or "combat simulations"? If those video games/simulations taught players/soldiers to behead opponents, would that be mere "fun"? — or something more serious?
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The vile, inhuman madness of the ads and games discussed above is not what any sane person could want for their society.
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All toxic media, all toxic ads, in whatsoever medium, should be destroyed, and the people guilty of inflicting them on uncountable hordes (and especially on unnumbered hordes of young people) should be punished with extreme severity, up to and including death.
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It never occurs to most people, until too late, that the human mind has no "erase" button but that everything they take in to their brain stays in their brain, where it can do phenomenal harm for many years, even to the end of their days.
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To wound one person that way is bad enuf. To wound millions cannot adequately be punished except by death.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,783.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:12 AM