*sigh*
Another important topic lost in the internet Egosphere.
I happened to agree with the original post. These mulitracial ads have been annoying me for years, mainly because they are a textbook example of classic agitprop. This is a very meaty, very weighty subject, which could have been explored with much profit. It dosen't look like that is going to happen now, but nevertheless I will offer an abbreviated version of the long comment I had planned to write, in the hopes that it might yet edify someone who still has the patience to read this far.
First of all, let us stipulate to the premise. Take television commercials, for example. Whenever you see a TV spot today, there is a high probability that, no matter what corporation or product the ad is ostensibly about, it will feature one of the following:
A) A black office-worker in a position of authority over whites. Does anybody remember Charles Robinson (i.e. "Max" from Night Court) in that commercial in which the line "We saved a nickel" was prominently featured? I don't recall what the ad was for, but I remember that line.
B) A female engineer or executive, being waited on attentively by three or four rather sheepish looking men. She usually presents as a geologist in a petroleum company commercial. The camera swings carressingly by her as she unroles some desk-sized survey maps in her hard hat and business suit.
C) An Asian male who is "one of the guys." He can be seen chugging brews with a retinue of other (appropriately multi-ethnic) chums, or grilling bratwursts on his back patio in his frat-boy stubble and college sweatshirt. His one outstanding feature is his irremediable rootedness in the quotidian details of the suburban beta-male playground, devoid of lofty aspirations or sublime thoughts.
D) A bosomy, prudential, middle-aged black woman who seems tough enough to be a guard at Rikers Island, and who bosses white folks into getting their business done. ("That's the power of Pinesol, baby!")
E) A nerdy white guy. Examples of this one are too numerous to mention, but the Capital One commercials of several years back, featuring David Spade and his hapless sidekick, are characteristic of the genre. These days, there is also often the innuendo that Mr. Nerdy White Guy is getting cuckolded by a member of another race (Shaquille O'Neil: "You're too slow, dad, and so's your DSL").
F) A somewhat phlegmatic white mother, who, when menanced in the park by an (always white) scoundrel in a hoodie, goes running to the arms of, not her husband or God, but some seller of security devices.
G) If an Hispanic woman appears in a commercial, she will be neither a mother nor a wife, but an attractive drone, an Ibsen Woman, a low-rent version of the business-gal in (B). Hispanic men as a rule are not shown in commercials at all, unless it is to play the victim in those home-grown television spots of which accident-and-injury law firms are so fond, for some God-forsaken reason. "If you've been hurt on the job and can't work, call attorney Sam Schmuckster. He's working hard for you!
Now, there is quite a wealth of psychological manipulation and insinuation to be discerned in these types; but first it is necessary to understand the basic style of presentation, the television commercial as "narrative" not as advertisement. The object of these dramas, these mini morality plays as it were, is to give you a sense of belonging to a certain culture with certain prescribed norms of what to pursue, what to desire, and what to fear.
The first six items, (A) through (F), have the principal effect of emasculating white men. That much should be fairly uncontroversial and has already been lamented, early and often. What is seldom recognized, however, is that these pseudo-stereotypes fill us with fascination precisely because they are contrary to known reality, i.e. they cater to our well-developed senses of irony and counterpoint, which are characteristic features practically unique to Western Man. While the content of the message is anti-Western, the style of the message is exactly in the key Western history, and is perceptible only to someone with Western intellect and Western sensibilities. There is in us the intense longing for antipodes, the projection to the opposite pole, and the quite Baroque desire to juxtapose and explore all possible permutations, that leads us to take a perverse sort of satisfaction in accomplishing the ironic, if only in the abstract realm of art.
This is the same sort of "contrapuntal" Western intellect that conceived of the planer curve as a function of two variables, and invented double-entry bookkeeping, a system of abstractly conceived debits and credits, as the engine and emblem of its economic existence. It once was a healthful conceit, and in its youth was responsible for perspective oil painting, chiaroscuro, and the music of Handel and Bach. Now in our decadence we turn our cynical and exacting eyes upon ourselves.
Item (G) above, is the exception that proves the rule, for the Western intellect also must needs have a sympathetic object, an opposite pole, on which to lavish all its pity and energy. This explains our well-known penchant for creating "charity cases," a pastime virtually unknown in the rest of the world.
We are quite decieved into thinking that these attitudes, these sensibilities of ours, are virtue itself, and not merely an overdeveloped passion for the ironic. And if I can, in a too-brief word, stride from one mountain top to another without adequate explanation, in effort to save time, I would venture to say that this highly stylized intellect of ours is the cause of the phenomenon of modernism, whole and entire, and also of the modernist heresy within the Church. For sentimental contrapuntalism in the field of politics is known as socialism, and socialism is a sin.
I would be happy to discuss this matter further if anybody shows an interest.
Topic: Multiracial (Read 21994 times)