That Chevy Ad

I am watching baseball these days. It's the World Series and, even though I don't really give a fig about the Tigers or the Cardinals, I'm a baseball fan, so, like Tommy Lasorda says, I watch. (It's good to see Tommy. I like the one where some woman calls Tommy to talk her husband out of a tree. He says "Who's he a fan of?" When she says "the Cubs," he say "Ugh.")

This, of course, also means that I am watching Chevy commercials. GM seems to have made a decision about 75 years ago that it would advertise Chevy heavily during baseball games to show that Chevy is darn American. They even had a song at one point where the chorus was "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet." So I guess a lot of people see baseball and Chevy as a natural fit. Sort of like Tiger Woods and Buick. (Oh, wait, no, those ads are ludicrous. Ferrari or LeSabre? Of course, Tiger would go with LeSabre.)

Anyway, so they've got a new Chevy ad for postseason baseball this year featuring the vocal stylings of John Cougar-Cougar Mellencamp-Mellecamp (given his various personal issues, the Muse calls him The Singing Scumbag) played over a montage of "American" images. He's singing "this is our country."

I am fascinated, weirded out and appalled by this ad. For a 30-second ad, it works hard.

The montage goes roughly like this: women in 50's two-piece swimsuits dancing on a beach, Rosa Parks sitting in front of a white guy on a bus, kids riding bikes in a suburb, lots of people at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King giving his "I Have a Dream" speech, hippie-looking people doing the Fugue or something, Muhammad Ali flattening a guy with a quick right while shuffling (dude, Ali was awesome), soldiers in Vietnam, protesters with peace signs, Nixon doing his weird victory wave he as he boards the helicopter after he resigned, some stuff that I don't remember, scenes of New Orleans being flooded after Hurricane Katrina, a shot of a black guy standing by his Chevy truck on a destroyed New Orleans block, generic scene of guys and Chevy trucks walking through a field, a shot of Dale Earnhardt's car racing on a track (amazingly, he's not bumping someone loose from behind), some non-Amish people pushing up the framing of the wall of a house, some supposed firefighters who like they're about ready to bust out with a Chippendales number and then the towers of light coming out of Manhattan from where the World Trade Center was.

On the one hand, I am fascinated by GM's disproportionate reliance on what were very, very controversial African-Americans in the ad. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. I recognize that each and every one of them has become kind of a transcedent icon. You are not going to convince me, however, that everyone in the U.S. thinks of those people as "their country" however much they truly are. Obviously, MLK was assassinated. People refused to call Muhammad Ali by that name for years after he converted to Islam and the US government tried to throw him in jail for refusing the Vietnam draft. It's fascinating to me that GM, the prototypical American company, is putting those three out there as a very large part of GM's vision of "our country."

On the other hand, Nixon flying off in disgrace as a big part of "our country." OK, some significant part of the country views Nixon as a big part of American political history (at Nixon's funeral, Bob Dole said that he thought that historians would come to call the second half of the 20th century "the Age of Nixon"). But does even that segment of the population want to see him flying off after resigning as "our country?" How about the picture of Nixon shaking hand with Vegas Elvis instead? As it stands, it's just weird. Maybe in 20 years, the Chevy ad will show Clinton waving his finger at the camera about how he "did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Finally, on the other hand (wait, that's three hands), I am just appalled at GM's blatant use of the two most horrible recent disasters in the US to sell cars. Flooded-out New Orleans is "our country?" No one wanted it to be, that's for damn sure. Is GM going to donate some slice of its Chevy sales while the commercial is running to some Katrina relief fund? Even worse is the use of the WTC towers of light. I have pretty much come around to the conclusion that there should be a law against the use of images from, or allusions to, Sept. 11 for commercial purposes. I am not kidding. I am a big believer in the First Amendment, but I don't really care that such a law probably would be unconstitutional. Let someone sue to throw it. Something like 2,749 people were murdered in the WTC. They are still finding body parts at the site. It is freakin' wrong for people to be Sept. 11 to sell anything. Although I guess cars are better than those flip-up coin things that I saw on cable TV a while ago.