That Dodge Commercial

I got kinda nauseous when I saw this, but I can admit also to being just a tiny bit impressed by its power.



Now, after a coupla days of Facebook Sharing of this "totally awesome (and not-even-a-little-cynically-manipulative-fantasy-fuck) tribute to The Real 'Murica", some dirty Librul at The Atlantic has to shit in the punch bowl over a few stoopid facts.

The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I'm sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash. So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I'd rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy's bizarre antics.

But there's a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.

Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge's ad. Here's what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.

I couldn't help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.

Taking one short step beyond the race thing (and remembering the last shot in this video), let's think about what a farm actually looks like here in 2013.  And then maybe we can talk about the simple fact that a farm isn't really a farm anymore - it's a factory.  You don't feed 7 Billion humans on a coupla chickens and a few acres of beans and millet and pygmy cucumbers.

One last thing: until the late 40s, Nostalgia was considered a mental disorder.