I ignored the Super Bowl on Sunday, and a good thing too, as
Ed Driscoll tells me if I had watched I would have been subjected to a barrage of liberal propaganda. No, this isn't the old Rush Limbaugh idea that
the NFL itself is left-wing; it's about the commercials:
So starting with one of the first Super Bowl-only ads, the legendary Ridley Scott-directed 1984-inspired Apple advertisement to launch the Macintosh, Madison Avenue ad reps began to use the platform to have fun. Ad reps created brilliant demo reels for themselves, and buzz for the clients’ products, which sometimes, with a little luck, even translated into increased sales.
That formula began to grate a bit in the postmodern naughts, as a formula began to evolve that featured men as the butts of jokes, part of a larger trend in the media overculture that Glenn Reynolds and others were first commenting on well over a decade ago. But those seem like pretty carefree days compared to what we witnessed last night...
Even worse than dumb husband jokes? Steel yourself, my friends:
By my rough count, there were at least two ads featuring people with no legs, one with a missing father, one with misogynistic anti-male crack from comedienne Sarah Silverman, and one ad bullying a ten year old boy because he said someone “plays like a girl.” (The horror.)
The ads with people with no legs, I suppose, were meant to make you feel sorry for them, which is a classic Democrat trick, and the father was probably missing because of no-fault divorce.
And perhaps most infamously based on comments on Twitter and even the London Daily Mail, one dead ten year old boy, thanks to Nationwide. (And if you don’t approve of this understandable media gruel, you’re an Internet “hater” — says Coca-Cola?)
I'm not sure why the famous dead kid ad is left-wing: was he murdered in the womb?
A friend of mine watching the game at my house last night, a fellow member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bivouacked behind enemy lines in Deep Blue Socialist California, dubbed it “The Nanny Bowl.” He’s definitely on to something. As journalist Kevin P. Craver tweeted to me last night, “I fell into an alternate universe in which the party that loses the November election gets to write the Super Bowl ads.”
Actually, the people who write the ads do so because they are paid by clients, who carefully vet the ads and then pay millions of dollars to get them on during the game. Contrary to Driscoll's paranoid fantasy, they aren't doing it so the ad guys can have fun, or as a donation to the Democratic Party; they do it so people will talk about their brands, and then remember them when they go shopping. It's as pure a capitalist spectacle as can be imagined. The League, the network, and the sponsors can hardly help it if no one ponied up for a #Benghazi infomercial.
Rush Limbaugh has been talking for years about how hard the left has been trying to undermine football...
OK, this is where we came in. Oh, wait: Driscoll eventually gets someone to explain the dead kid-Democrat connection:
The modern left’s ideology is one big Nationwide ad. Submit to our practices or your kids will die. Only our mandated health insurance will treat your Bain cancer or protect you from global warming...
It's like he had a mole in the focus group! I look forward to Driscoll's column on how the left was responsible for
Daniel Bryant getting screwed in the Royal Rumble.
