Posted on 02/10/2014 9:49:13 AM PST by Kaslin
Coke’s Super Bowl ad, featuring a montage of America the Beautiful in eight languages amidst scenes of beautiful people and landscapes wins this year’s controversy award. At one level, it’s just a company selling “sugar water,” in Steve Jobs’s famous phrase. But, of course, there’s more to it. Coke spent untold millions to produce a message touching social, cultural, and political nerves to make us notice and talk about it.Coke succeeded. The ad is beautiful, manipulative, disingenuous, and subversive.
Critics have struggled to express what troubles them, some thoughtfully and some in blunderbuss fashion. It’s elusive because the piece is beautiful and humanly warm. Ultimately, criticism of the ad is not about discomfort with diversity. It’s about the limits of diversity in core concepts and sinews that should unite our nation. To fully secure the peace and freedom that enable and animate our human diversity, there has to be a shared governing creed. The ad subtly undermines the idea of any core cultural commonality.
First, let’s get a grip. It’s just a pretty commercial. It’s not a candidate’s platform or a movement’s manifesto. On an importance scale of 1-to-10, this is a 2. The misguided expressions of outrage and calls to boycott Coke played right into the marketing department’s fondest hopes. But smug denunciations of critics and charges of racism and xenophobia weren’t triumphs of intellectual honesty, either.
Embedded in the ad was something unsettling and provocative. It’s not that the ad praised diversity of people and languages in America. It’s not because lots of Americans like to “demonize people who don’t look like the way they’d like them to look like or came from some other place,” Colin Powell’s clumsy recent phrase from another context. America is full of human diversity that Americans rightly celebrate. Coke could have rendered virtually any other song in the same way and no one would have raised an eyebrow.
No, the reaction is not to diversity. The ad is noteworthy and controversial only because it transformed a patriotic song—a sentimental second national anthem for many—to make its multicultural, multi-lingual point.
Still what’s the problem? It is this: the ad is sophisticated and manipulative in service of a fiction. It depicts a vision that doesn’t exist in reality and that its proponents don’t really believe in. It subtly takes sides in a debate about the meaning of America and Americanism. It does these things framed in a way that exalts the left wing view and scores cheap points against traditional understanding of American exceptionalism and against some of its sputtering, not fully artful articulators.
In the simplest terms, the multi-cultural American patriotism depicted in the ad not only doesn’t exist, it’s an oxymoron. There is growing tension between the historic ideas of assimilation on the one hand and preserving a separateness of national and ethnic heritage on the other. The forces arguing for deeper, more divided cultural diversity are not typically flag-waving translators of America the Beautiful into native tongues . They’re not generally the people who revere and sing about pilgrims’ stern impassioned stress, thoroughfares of freedom, and America’s liberating strife. The image is a sugary, beautiful lie.
Subcultures that self-segregate, observe separate national or ethnic traditions, and preserve a different mother tongue, aren’t known for celebrating anything uniquely American.Communities that observe Ramadan, celebrate Cinco de Mayo, or speak of Reconquista, absolutely are part of a beautiful American tapestry. But they aren’t bursting into patriotic American songs. People who were uncomfortable with the ad knew they were being sold a fantasy.
More, the fantasy is at odds with what multi-culturalists value and promote. America the Beautiful, especially in the latter verses, celebrates our nation’s exceptionalism. Multi-culturalists celebrate the universality of humanity and equality of all cultures. Multi-culturalists focus more on the lines from Liberty’s inscription about poor huddled masses than they do on the meaning of “yearning to breathe free.”
What is “free” about America? What about America through the ages has called to striving, seeking people? Is it anything multi-culturalists will describe and defend?It is a life built on freedom, on opportunity, rooted in limited government, and the human chance to succeed or fail. It’s the difference that Ronald Reagan called the “last best hope of man on earth.” Consider a bit more from that famous speech:
“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, […] is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue […]. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
President Obama expresses quite a different understanding of American uniqueness when he observes: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Nothing special to see here. Move along.
Some viewers of the Coke ad sense the song reflects the spirit that Reagan described, but, they’re being poured a glass of syrup more in tune with Obama’s sensibilities. In the battle over political culture, defenders of American exceptionalism cite various critical elements, including the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, the structure and limits in the Constitution, and the unifying cords of a common national language.The ad subtly and appealingly whispers that none of that matters. Anyone’s idea of America is as good as anyone else’s. There is no exceptional American creed; there are just all the beautiful people of the world.
The ad appealed to human brotherhood and national pride, but pride in what? I wonder what Coke would say.
I love the product, but the manufactureres have become such asses I’m switching - (anything but Pepsi).
If I ever have the desire to drink a can of sugar, it’ll be a Pepsi...
A well written article but the commercial was much more than a commercial.
It was globalist propaganda intended to undermine America and move us closer to Amerika.
Not much to be said that has not been said already.
But, just to reinforce...shove it up your collective Obamaholes, Coke.
Borders, language, culture.
Liberals evidently have none of the above.
I don’t drink cokes or sodas, except on very rare occasions either Sprite, or Sierra Mist
Plenty of evidence to show they contribute to a myriad of diseases, when drank regularly.
I switched to tea. Better for you and cheaper too.
GFU Coke and Pepsi . . .go rot “Diversity’s” innards with your crap
No more Coke Products until they apologize. I don’t drink Pepsi since they support Obama’s Logo. I will generic sodas and beer.
I stick to diet Verner’s. I like the way it makes me burp. Period!
No. The ad SELLS the idea that the core cultural commonality is that there isn't one and it works anyway.
While true to a limited degree upon which they rely to sell "the program," what happens in reality is that the leftists are selling division (diversity) with which to justify more power for them to get paid for dealing with the resulting conflicts. Somehow, these "settlements" are always preferential to the leftists in charge: more government power, more prison guards, interpreters, police, judges, lawyers, clerks... you name it. NONE of those professions produces wealth, indeed, they impoverish the middle class. Hence the goal.
My wife took offense when she saw the ad. My immediate comment to her was that Coke is a global company and not a US company so why expect them to act like they are US citizens. The company and its products are not US and have not been for many years.
Coke Brands - http://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands/all/
Pepsi Brands - http://www.pepsico.com/Brands/BrandExplorer#top-global
Its difficult to stay away from these two companies but I am certainly trying.
It’s......a.......commercial.
Sprite is owned by Coke.
True, but the SB is a decidedly American event; arguably the biggest of the year. The lion's share of viewers are Americans as well. I am not inclined to give them a pass because they sell globally - they know full well this is NWO propaganda.
Coke’s message was e pluribus pluribus, not e pluribus unum.
All the carbonated beverages at Aldi and elsewhere are fine... I am not loyal to brands, so it works for me. Much better prices, too.
There is very little I still insist on having with a name brand.
I have seen the ad but once. I had a visceral negative reaction to it. After some introspection, I understand why I felt as I did. America the Beautiful is about pride in America and a belief that America is exceptional in a very positive way. While the ad could be seen as expressing the thought that many different cultures view America in that way, I saw it as just more garbage from the multicultural propagandists who do not feel that way about America and who continue to spout the nonsense that “in diversity is our strength.” Diversity at least did not weaken us when immigrants assimilated well, learned English, and moved into the economic mainstream. They were then primarily American and secondarily loyal to their home countries. My mother is, and both my paternal grandparents were, typical of such immigrants. More recent immigrants do not seem to be assimilating as well, and a lack of assimilation does not strengthen us. It Balkanizes us.
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