By SJ Otto
I hate commercials. They annoy me. At
times they try to pretend they are entertainment. Other times they pretend to
be news updates. But their aim is always to try and get us to buy something. Larry King says he likes
to connect people with things that work. He is simply trying to sell us clam
oil pills to stop pain. If I could get rid of commercials I would.
This year, as with many years past, the
Super Bowl ads are now looked forward to as if they were real entertainment. I
see news people showing us the most interesting and anticipated ads for the Super
Bowl. But now the ads have hit an all-time low as Dodge uses part of a Martin Luther King Jr.
speech to sell us their trucks.
According to MICHAEL
HILTZIK:
“Amid the commercial
miasma swirling around Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, one advertisement actually
stood out as something of a cultural and social event. It was an ad for Dodge
Ram trucks, featuring the uplifting words of none other than Martin Luther King
Jr.
The ad provoked
immediate comment on social media – none of it, as far as we can tell,
positive. It was seen as a landmark in crassness. That was true not least
because in the speech excerpted for the ad, a 1968 sermon entitled “The Drum
Major Instinct,” King spends some considerable time excoriating the
advertiser-driven quest for material acquisitions, including cars.
“We are so often
taken by advertisers,” he declared. “They have a way of saying things to you
that kind of gets you into buying…. You’ve seen people riding around in
Cadillacs and Chryslers who don’t earn enough to have a good T-Model Ford.”
Those words weren’t in the script for the Ram truck company (which is owned by,
yes, Fiat Chrysler). The ad just stuck to King’s exhortation to become great by
serving others.”
Apparently the King family gave permission for Dodge to use this
speech. So what were the King family members thinking when they allowed a
speech by one of our most beloved social commentators of the 20th
century? I can only guess— $$MONEY$$!
This ad takes a
speech that was meant to inspire people to think about the meaning of our lives
and our relationship towards others and gave it a new meaning—to buy our
trucks. The seriousness of such a speech is lost on the crass commercialism and
materialism that has soaked in to every fiber of our collective being. The
message is simple—buy lots of stuff, whether you need it or not, and contribute
to the economy. Such crass commercialism seems to be a form of cultural pollution.
Ads are everywhere we go—TV radio, our computers. They are in every public
place imaginable. The message is always to buy something. As a culture I would
like to think that Americans have more to say about life than buy something and
try to find happiness through the ownership of material things.
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