Sep
17
When I was a kid, I saw a commercial for a toy called Manglor Mountain. It was a volcano that erupted slime and came with a rubbery monster — the Manglord! — you could literally tear limb from limb. Even better, you could reattach his severed limbs. Well, I begged my parents to buy me this macabre little playset for Christmas. Sure enough, on Christmas morning, it was beneath the tree. I promptly ripped the Manglord’s arm off, but when I tried to reattach it, the damn thing wouldn’t stick. The commercial had lied to me. The toy was a big pile of suck.
I don’t watch TV anymore, and I have a special place in my heart reserved for hating television commercials. I don’t think my intense dislike for advertisements is entirely the fault of the Manglor Mountain spot. But after two decades of watching TV, I found advertisements to be more than a little disingenuous and endlessly astonished by the fact that people over the age of 5 still believe what the idiot box tells them.
That being said, I think political ads are 30-second horrorshows. I don’t see them on TV, of course, but they play the hell out of them on Air America if only to rip on all the white noise coming from the McCain camp. I’m not really interested in bashing McCain at length in this blog, though. I’d rather rip on how our culture of advertising has infiltrated politics and turned our candidates into widgets that have to be sold to the American public.
Barack Obama and John McCain aren’t Coke and Pepsi. They’re not a product or service. That we’ve become so lazy, so incurious a culture that TV spots are what decide elections, not an informed electorate, is terrifying. Commercials lie like a damn rug, folks! It’s one thing to get a shoddy toy for Christmas because you were a child and didn’t know better than to believe what you saw on TV. It’s another to spend the next four years with another dullard in the White House because he had the better commercials.
Why not just vote for the Manglord? He’s got experience.
-Brad Lohan
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