Originally known as the Hilltop ad commissioned by Coca-Cola and performed by the New Seekers, this one-minute spot become so popular it was re-recorded and released as a full-length single in 1971. The song became an immediate hit - reaching #1 in the U.K. and #7 in the U.S. respectively. The song offered a thoughtful message for a more introspective time.
Yesterday - on Super Bowl Sunday - Coca Cola aired a new one-minute spot to invoke the successful “feel good” message of the original Hilltop song. It showcased the patriotic hymn, America the Beautiful performed in several languages – English, Arabic, and Spanish. How times have changed!
In 2014 - unlike 1971 - no good deed remains unpunished. These days, any message that appeals to our higher angels brings out the hate brigade. Here is the rightwing reaction to Coca Cola's latest ad:
"A truly disturbing commercial" (Allen West);
“[The ad] features gay people” (Michael Patrick Leahy of Breitbart);
“Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing
the border” (Todd Starnes of Fox News).
Virtually overnight, irredentist outrage inspired a Subway-style boycott designed to bully and dissuade Coca Cola, or any corporation, from promoting the moral message of "crown thy good in brotherhood:"
Finally, these latest YouTube comments reveal the truly repugnant side of today’s rightwing movement:
Jose Blanco (5 hours ago) “Multiculturalism is a code word for White genocide.”Sonny Bagwell (6 hours ago) “See, the jews who run all ad agencies have been brainwashing Americans for DECADES now. This is why we have no morality left."
In a sense, the rabid reaction reveals the unholy alliances between disparate factions within today’s GOP - mainstream conservatives, libertarians, nullification Tea Partiers, Dominionist theocrats, neo-Confederates, and their chorus of bigots, racists, and anti-Semites.
For the moment, I will withhold any reference to gratuitous and unpleasant stereotypes. However, I will not refrain from offering this advice to our conservative and libertarian friends: Beware the company you keep lest you be judged accordingly!
For the moment, I will withhold any reference to gratuitous and unpleasant stereotypes. However, I will not refrain from offering this advice to our conservative and libertarian friends: Beware the company you keep lest you be judged accordingly!
No doubt the New Right has become a catch basin or grease trap that accumulates the nasty, smelly stuff you want to filter out to protect the sewer system. I suspect that the sort of people who have such sludge in their skulls
ReplyDeletewhere the brain is supposed to be have always been with us, like lice, intestinal parasites and the pox, but once upon a time if you didn't look under rocks and you held your nose walking past open manhole covers, you didn't notice so easily. Today any one of these turds can be heard worldwide in an instant and I think the internet magnifies their effect and gives them power they've never had before. It's one thing to recruit a mob to bust up a beer hall or drag some old men out of a synagogue and beat them to death, or surround a village of black people and shoot them like dogs or string some kid up on a light pole -- and another to recruit huge numbers worldwide from the safety of their basement rooms and rotting cracker shacks. It's so easy to do it on line where nobody. . . Nobody like me perhaps can pull the Kalashnikov from behind the couch, get the Beretta from the closet shelf, the chain saw from the garage and a couple of my larger machetes and paint the pavement red.
Yes, I saw this story on MSNBC a little while ago and such images did pass fleetingly through my mind, but then something whispered "Denominator Neglect" and wondered if such people constituted one in two million. That would be far more than enough to make it seem like a movement using the multiplier effect of the electronic media. A few hundred would do - perhaps even a few dozen if their odor were spread with the speed of light.
So maybe we shouldn't worry so much -- or on the other hand perhaps we could take comfort in the fact that with such small numbers I might not have to buy additional ammunition. . .
Captain,
DeleteI changed the wording of one paragraph to read:
“Virtually overnight, irredentist outrage inspired a Subway-style boycott designed to bully and dissuade Coca Cola, or any corporation, from promoting the moral message of "crown thy good in brotherhood [my bold]:"
Why? I felt the need to change the vector of the argument. The irredentists make one moral claim (i.e. the so-called “desecration” of the national anthem); my rephrasing points to a competing claim (i.e. the core values embodied in the anthem itself). Pivoting from one argument to the other allows me to reveal the hypocrisy behind the irredentist claim.
Why the importance of this shift in emphasis? Although few in number, the influence of the radical fringe is outsized; they command – through their outrageousness – far more press exposure than their numbers deserve; and I cannot make any claim that our side winning.
Mistakes all too often made by liberals: Failure to frame messages in moral terms, arguing from evidence, wordiness, citing polls and statistics, ignoring the power of emotional appeals that resonate in the subconscious, and dismissing our opponents as stupid.
Lunatics do not believe in polls or follow them; they want to change them. Extremists do not argue from the center; any movement on their part concedes too much ground. Repeating a ludicrous talking point to ridicule them does not ridicule them; it merely helps them reinforce their message - as they annoy us.
Frames are powerful instruments of propaganda. They shape our ideas, the way we reason, and how we respond. We’ve got to do better … or witness the retreat of progress and our vanishing way of life.
I like your reframing of the argument. Frames are indeed important, as we have seen in the choice debate where the right insists that the frame is pro-abortion vs. pro-life, rather than pro-choice vs. anti-choice.
DeleteFrankly I see little hope in anything we say about them or to them. They can't be convinced. Their beliefs are produced ny or influenced by reason and analysis only helps us understand that they're crazy. I no longer thing human institutions are capable of long term stability and in a society like ours where so much latent power is in the hands of stupid, ignorant, delusional and angry people so easily manipulated by amoral, greedy entities, chaos and collapse have to be inevitable. Look as Syria and see our future.
DeleteI'm simply too angry to discuss it rationally any more and I've lost all hope.
Hope is a difficult thing to hold on to and I feel your despair, Captain. We have to hang in there because surrender is not a viable alternative.
DeleteSheria, You've been a source of hope before and you still are, but progress is so slow and erratic and so easily undone. Sometimes you have to think like a geologist to notice changes and our country seems to be rejecting everything we've accomplished in so many areas.
DeleteBut no, we can't surrender.
Just when you think the rightwing can't sink any lower, their brain trust gets out the shovels and digs themselves a deeper hole.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE free speech.
ReplyDeleteIt lets us see so perfectly and clearly how besotted these dregs of our culture are with the idea of victimhood. When representatives of our immigrant population get together to sing the praises of America, this small, deranged segment of our culture sees only treason and "the end of all that is American holy."
The sane among us see this as a continuum of what helped make this country great. Immigrants. (And let's not forget the culture that was already here, the culture that lived in harmony with those spacious skies.)
I'm afraid you can't fix stupid.
They're the ones we are ashamed for.
Modern day Benito Mussolini wannabee, Glen Beck, chimes in on this very important issue:
ReplyDeleteWhy did you need that to divide us politically? Because that’s all this ad is. It’s in your face, and if you don’t like it, if you’re offended by it, you’re a racist. If you do like it, you’re for immigration. You’re for progress...That’s all this is: To divide people...Remember when Coke used to do the thing on the top and they would all hold hands? Now it’s, have a Coke and we’ll divide you.
Editor's note: As I read the words of Beck before allowing this post, I found myself parroting the voice of Cartman from South Park.
I would like to know why Glenn Beck thinks this refrain is divisive:
Delete“And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!”
Or why he considers this refrain to be divisive:
“Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!”
Or why Glenn Beck thinks spreading an authentic American message in multiple languages is divisive? One would think these messages would appeal to the self-righteous “exceptionalist” fringe.
Does Glenn Beck retract his apology to Reform Jews for comparing them to radicalized Islam, a comment the Anti-Defamation League called “bigoted?”
Here is Shaw’s recent post, Glenn Beck haz a sad, where the unrepentant clown regrets having "played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart" Or are all apologies merely momentary in the mind of the clown?
Nope. The Great White Dope is up to his old tricks again!
Which brings me back to point (above): “Repeating a ludicrous talking point to ridicule them does not ridicule them …”
You can't really apologize for a remark like that. We're not in the seventh grade. He was only doing damage control.
DeleteGlenn Beck doesn't think at all, he just reacts. If there's a pattern to his bloviating it's only that everything Obama does being evil (it's an axiom) everything said against him is therefore correct and thus needs no reference to facts. What he takes as facts are only things made necessary in order to support the evil of Obama. Consistency does not matter, contradiction does not matter. Everything Obama is everything evil. It all begins and ends there. No logic need apply.
DeleteBeck said that? After just recently admitting that his program contributed a great deal to the divisiveness in this country? I know Beck isn't what one would label a "thinker," but I did believe he was at the very least, conscious. Apparently not.
ReplyDeleteVia Digby. I so much miss commenting on her site. She is my only west coast bloggy friend.
DeleteA wise man keeps his own company.
ReplyDeleteRN,
DeleteA wise man may keep his own company, but a flip remark does not necessarily signal a position or knowing the mind of a person. I raise this point, not for purposes of putting you on the spot, but because it is important for me know if there remain any “shared values" around which citizens – even of different persuasions - can find common cause.
Case in point: The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, recognized by virtually every historian as a man of towering stature and a hero in the Republic. To my surprise – and shock – I found this comment recently posted by a blogger known to both of us:
“I outlined what-I-consider-to-have-been flagrant ABUSES of presidential power starting with Abraham Lincoln, whom I regard -- against popular opinion -- as one of history's Great Villains … (January 31, 2014 at 12:09 PM).
Is this comment a mere example of “Denominator Neglect,” as coined by the good Captain, or representative of a more widespread devolution of America into a “late stage Weimar Republic?”
Perhaps you are not hearing the same alarm bells within our body politic.
Denominator neglect was coined, I believe, by Daniel Kahneman. I got it from his seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow which explains better than anything I've read, just why humans are irredeemably irrational. We will see 1:1,000,000 possibilities as terrifying and ignore1:4 risks. -- all of us.
DeleteBoycotted Coke years ago, still steadfast. For health reasons.
ReplyDeleteIn fact you did not put me on the spot (O)CT(O)PUS as it was a reasonable observation.
ReplyDeleteShort response in answer is yes, I believe there is.
For values to be shared however requires the values to be defined and commonly understood and generally accepted by the broad vast majority.. There is a huge disconnect occurring in America and her body politic today.
Therefore I keep my own counsel. I was not a yes man in business and I sure as hell will not be a ventriloquist for any party or ideology. It simply is what it is.
I am not a modern conservative, I am not a modern progressive, I tend to lean social libertarian and fiscal conservative. But really I am more a Classical Liberal than anything.
Whether or not that means there are shared values, well, I guess I'll leave that to you to decide for yourself. As for me I'm happy following my own counsel and trying to do the right thing. That to me is a very individual thing.
Fortunately I have thick skin and am not easily intimidated.
The next obvious questions to ask: If there are shared values, then what are they? What accounts, in your opinion, for the “huge disconnect” occurring in our body politic today? How can partisans bridge the abyss of anger, vituperation, and resentment that divides them?
DeleteHonest answers, please. Don’t hold back.
I have become the skeptic. To those questions there is NO acceptable answer. Honesty is merely a commodity as truth is determined by what each partisan side decides fits its agenda. Neither side wants compromise unless it is the compromise THEY want.
ReplyDeleteWe have a choice, side P, side C, side L. Whatever side you choose just be ready to march to the drum beat and sing the party line. Which is, at least IMNHO, BULLSHIT. However, it is just the way it is.
Honesty, right. The only honesty anyone wants is the arguments that support their agenda For the partisan there can only be their agenda. Hint, I have yet to here a progressive ever reconsider and change their mind. Some believe it is elitism or arrogance. I don't know and really don't care.
I keep my own consel ans company.
A little boy goes to his dad and asks, "What's politics?"
DeleteDad says, "Well son, let me try to explain it this way: I'm the breadwinner of the family, so let's call me capitalism. Your Mom is the administrator of the money, so we'll call her the Government. We're here to take care of your needs, so we'll call you the people. The nanny, we'll consider her the Working Class. And your baby brother, we'll call him the Future. Now, think about that and see if that makes sense,"
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what dad had said.
Later that night, he hears baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. Sure enough, baby brother has soiled his diaper. So the little boy goes to his parents' room and finds his mother sound asleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his daddy in bed with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed. The next morning, the little boy says to his father, "Dad, I understand politics now."
The father says, "Good son, tell me what you think politics is all about."
The little boy replies, "Well, while Capitalism is screwing the Working Class, the Government is sound asleep, the People are being ignored, and the Future is in deep doo-doo."
Yep, bout sums it up.
DeleteRN,
Delete"I have yet to here a progressive ever reconsider and change their mind."
Well I change mine all the time - even about you, if you remember. But people, and lots of research backs this up, people fight harder to keep from losing something than they fight to gain something. We feel worse about losing a dollar than about making ten bucks. It's hard for anyone to back down or retreat or recant.
I really don't know if I'm a Progressive for believing progress is possible or if I'm a liberal or not. Those terms are as shifty as ghosts and politicians and harder to pin down, but I think the things we fight hardest to hang on to have to do with tribal identification. Liberals tend to buy the whole Liberal package and so do the other guys and all will defend things that really aren't true and can be shown not to be true just because it's part of being a member. I know liberals who defend science when talking about climate change but reject science in many other areas. I hear alleged Conservative haters of socialism ask why we can't be more like China. Cynicism seems like the only rational response.
I think the fact that the extreme right has crossed over into revolutionary antics, unscrupulous, devious, anarchistic rhetoric and totally paranoid fantasies like the bomb throwing loonies of 100 years ago they once opposed -- I think that fact has made it easy for those who oppose them to feel righteous because anything is better than Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I think the old Nietzsche thing about fighting monsters applies. Maybe the modern Liberal is a product of the Modern Conservative - maybe vice versa too.
RN
DeleteWhen I asked these questions …
“If there are shared values, then what are they? What accounts, in your opinion, for the “huge disconnect” occurring in our body politic today? How can partisans bridge the abyss of anger, vituperation, and resentment that divides them?”
In the above, there were no insinuations or characterizations of any kind. I accused you of nothing; yet this was your reply:
“I have yet to here [hear] a progressive ever reconsider and change their mind. Some believe it is elitism or arrogance. I don't know and really don't care.”
Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Perhaps I should rephrase my original question: Why visit progressive forums when you hold us in such low regard?
Simple questions in search of simple answers, there was no posturing on my part. I feel hurt that you opened fire for no reason at all. Your reply did not ennoble you. Part of the problem or part of the solution, which would you prefer?
The reply was not a personal attack, it was an observation I make with respect to progressives as a group. I make the same observation with respect to conservatve and libertarian hard liners. I stand by my observations. Perhaps it is my bad for not spelling it out. I made the assumption based on my entire comment it was understand. That and I take issue with the far right as often as the left.
DeleteI visit a very small number of progressives sites. There is a reason for this. Suffice to say the few I do offer something of value. In honesty, I visit fewer and fewer conservative sites. They bore me.
I am sorry you felt hurt and viewed my remarks as opening fire. Such was not the intent.
I prefer to keep my own counsel and will leave it to others to determine which I am (O)CT(O)PUS.
The right would much prefer singing children that are carrying side arms.
ReplyDeleteI know I'm a republican now but I just bought 50 shares of Coca Cola stock, KO, more for the fact that it's ad pissed off a bunch of deluded fools than it's a safe, dividend paying portfolio core company.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to buy Glenn Beck a coke and pour it up his nose
ReplyDeleteIt's the real thing
Well Captain, once again you make a bundle of sense. Well said.
ReplyDeleteLabels (party affiliations and ideological tags) are becoming more and more meaningless. This is likely because most people are a mixture of consevative as well as liberal views based on a bunch of things. Not the least of which is their personal life experiences, associations, and education.
It is difficult not being affected by these influences. Being an individual in the truest sense of the word is a challenge. One very much worth taking on and hopefully meeting.