SELLING THE VACUUM

Commentary on the commercialism of the Superbowl, originally published in 2014. 

by Colin Liddell

@NewAltRight

If economics teaches us anything it is that you can look at one set of figures and see endless prosperity, but squint at them and you’ll see nothing but doom and gloom.

So, with so much subjectivity around, how do you get at the truth? My advice is to forget the number crunching, the charts, and other diagnostic tools of the modern witch doctors, and start reading the signs directly. In a sky without eagles it might be rather hard to resort to a bit of augury, but just as the Etruscans and Romans had their avian messengers, so the society of the present day also has its sky-borne bringers of truth. We call them commercials and the US Superbowl seems to signify their season, especially as American football is a sport that seems tailor-made for showing them.

COKE AIN'T IT

                     

by Andy Nowicki

I’ll admit that I had an immediate, visceral, and startlingly profane reaction to the now notorious Coca-Cola advertisement broadcast during the Super Bowl, as my poor, patient wife can attest. 

The commercial, as surely you must know by now, features “America the Beautiful” being sung in various languages while a dippy montage unfolds featuring breakdancing blacks, hijab-adorned Middle Eastern women, yarmulked men, loveably grizzled septagenarian Latino cowboys and adorable urban effeminates (with a few sparse hints of white, seeming-heterosexual suburbanites begrudgingly thrown in as if in afterthought).

THE DESEXING OF BEYONCE

by Colin Liddell

The female pop star is akin to the mayfly; a delicate little creature that appears briefly, in the flower of its life, flutters around, oohs and aahs, and then disappears…no one knows where. This is its essence and natural law. If it continues past its sell-by-date it has to evolve into a different creature and jettison much of what makes it it.