Saturday, February 8, 2014

One-part harmony: Best performed on only the white notes

Let us go then, you and I, in the Riddled time machine -- or down through the windy corridors of Memory, for those of us gifted or cursed with that old-fashioned attribute -- back 40-odd years to 1971. Oh look what we see, it is the Coca-Cola corporation investing a lot of money in an advertising campaign designed to push multiculturalism down people's throats. Not to mention sugary carbonated drinks flavoured with caffeine, tartaric and phosphoric acid.
The eventual total cost of the commercial was $250,000 — an unheard of price in 1971 for an advertisement. The finished product, first aired in July 1971, featured a multicultural group of young people lip syncing the song on a hill outside Rome, Italy. The global unity of the singers is emphasized by showing that the bottles of Coke they are holding are labelled in a variety of languages.
The theme of multiculturalism recurred in nostalgic revivals of the campaign in 2006, 2007 and 2010.
"Buy the World a Coke" was produced by Billy Davis and portrayed a positive message of hope and love sung by a multicultural collection of teenagers on the top of a hill.
So American conservatives have been putting up with this provocation for four decades but at last their patience is AT AN END. Our observers* of the human centipede of the rightwing bloggosphere inform us that the CCCorp, by recognising the existence of non-white, non-English speaking consumers persons, has made itself the recipient of a wingnut SKREEE:
Executives at Coca Cola thought it was a good idea to run a 60 second Super Bowl ad featuring children singing "America the Beautiful" – a deeply Christian patriotic anthem whose theme is unity – in several foreign languages. The ad also prominently features a gay couple....When the company used such an iconic song... to push multiculturalism down our throats, it's no wonder conservatives were outraged.
Outraged bunny IS OUTRAGED.

* More precisely, Yestreblansky, to whom we would reply directly except the Disqust commenting system no longer accepts a Google account as a way of logging in.

8 comments:

Yastreblyansky said...

That's unspeakably vile. One reason I went to Disqus was fambly who couldn't comment with Blogger. But then that was their own fault (one was a Luddite WordPress user).

mikey said...

Wait.

You mean when those kids suggested they wanted to world to consume coke at their cost, they meant soda pop and not a couple grams of Peruvian Flake™?

Well, that probably explains why they never paid my invoice...

Smut Clyde said...

That's unspeakably vile

I checked the Gmail account I used to use for commenting through Disqus, and discovered a new trend of What's-hot-around-the-WWW spam *from* Disqus.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

or down through the windy corridors of Memory, for those of us gifted or cursed with that old-fashioned attribute

Smutes the Memorious...

Trevor said...

Good lord. Do these people actually read what they write? Or am I being too generous in assuming that they can read? And the "logic" in there brings to mind the underpants gnome's business plan.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I would think that reading things and writing them are separate duties, and specialization makes for industrial efficiency.
~

Yastreblyansky said...

That's why cops travel in pairs, according to the folklore I was brought up with: one does the reading and the other does the writing.

Smut Clyde said...

Do these people actually read what they write?

I suspect that they read it and rub their chins sagely, nodding -- "Yes, that puts it so well!"