With a couple of instances, most somewhat from the NFL itself, the advertisements for Super Bowl LIX tried their best to appeal people with feel-good sentimentality. A” Country Roads” singalong, Harrison Ford driving a Car, Glen Powell driving a Ram vehicle— also Bud Light went all in on light men with Shane Gillis and his grass-cutting smoking.
The NFL’s overt dig at high school men who play football was the most “woke” of the bunch, which is certainly a strange group to target with disgust. The concept was that people are keeping girlbosses from playing symbol football, which is not the least risk children’s sports have faced in recent years. ( Nike’s ad about oppression in women’s sports was similarly tone-deaf. )
I won’t try to define Coffee-Mate’s total flying tongue montage, which was met with jokes from the dwelling room I was watching. Yes, we’re all talking about it, but I want RFK Jr. to outlaw all espresso creamers with longer shelf life than a year.
However, the ads were much less judgmental and much more knowledgeable that Donald Trump was simply re-elected as president. The typical headline websites claimed that America was “BACK.” Slate’s examination of the business lineup was the “MAGA-dom” might now be” historically powerful”. Perhaps the Clydesdales had returned.
The aura shift is clear, sure. However, it reminds one of the appeal for “amnesty” after the Biden administration and business America forced people to leave their jobs, neighborhoods, and populations in the name of Covid. Mistakes were made, they admitted, but now that we’ve decided not to square up the unvaccinated and put them in shelters, doesn’t we let bygones be bygones?
Four decades before this month’s rah-rah USA business, Jeep collaborated with left Bruce Springsteen to teaching Americans about their social division. Springsteen, who had called the second Trump administration a” f—ing problem”, suggested that, with Biden late in charge, we may suddenly all became the” Re United States of America”. The link to Van sales wasn’t clear, but the political text was: If you don’t like the Biden administration’s extreme excess or the suspicious circumstances by which it came to power, you’re the issue.
Watching Harrison Ford talk about freedom, while a touch overdone, is definitely an improvement. Corporate America is only concerned about their bottom line, not to mention the fact that it has grown to love liberals.
For the same purpose, Target should not be given credit for renaming its La programs, which give them little credit for preventing wake sermons and gentlemen in ladyface from appearing in their commercials this day. It’s not a bad place to start, but it’s just a step back from what was a really long road of hatred for regular Americans.
Restoring our nation’s culture will require major self-assessment and a willingness to reject historical poisons rather than simply gloss over them. No number of feel-good America will save our national ethnic figure if we operate more like a world office-park-slash-slush-fund than a state.
Genuine loyalty calls for a sense of shared identity. What makes a liberal Midwestern factory worker different from a progressive Manhattan girl? Or a rebel torn down statues of American heroes while giving her a baby a copy of the stories of British heroes? It won’t work if you believe in free markets or international military invasion. You must believe in a shared history, a shared responsibility to protect it, and keep it as an heir to your kids. Unfortunately, corporations have been a major part in that assault, and a long war of attrition against that shared identity has severely damaged our nation’s knowledge of it.
Sure, it’s great to see an esthetic nod to America in the Super Bowl advertising portfolio. The advertisements are shallow and cheesy because they celebrate the last vestiges of an identity for which they have generally lost the lexicon.
The vocabulary also exists. But business boardrooms, yet those storyboarding sweet compilations of American colors to buy cars and foreclosures, aren’t where you’ll find it.
Elle Purnell is the elections director at The Federalist. Her job has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She was given her B. Patrick Henry College offers an A. in state with a media small. Following her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
