Sunday, February 12, 2012

Super Bowl Half Time show & ads = "Mourning in America?"

Richard Spencer in Altright has a good piece on Clint Eastwood's ad for Chrysler. Worth a read. Here's the punch line:
In 1984, the Reagan-Bush election team announced that it was “Morning in America.” Socionomically speaking, for the GOP middle-class base, this meant that run-away inflation was over; the Dow Jones was in a secular bull market; companies were hiring; and Americans could feel proud again.

“Half Time” is something like “Mourning in America.” In terms of the Kübler-Ross Stages of Grief” schema, it suggests that, collectively, Americans are somewhere between Depression and Denial.

Chrysler must have recognized that it couldn’t advertise its cars with a “We’re #1!” rock anthem. It must be true to the time. But “Half Time” is, nevertheless, a world of illusions and wishful thinking. A nation-state doesn’t “come back” from public and private indebtedness amounting to 350 percent of GDP—from a financial oligarchy bent on stripping the country bare—from a demographic transformation into a Third World nation—and more. To reformulate F. Scott Fitzgerald, there will be no second half for America. The sooner the Founding stock comes to grips with this fact—and begins charting a different destiny—the better.

SNL also parodied the ad, ending it with the line from Grand Torino: "Get off my lawn!"

In the previous text of Spencer's article which mentions Highland Park, a former prestigious suburb of Detroit, the full meaning of Eastwood's words in the flick are revealed.
UPDATE National Review's Rich Lowry has an entire article on the dishonesty of the Chrysler ad and Obama's deceptive and manipulative policies to deceive a gullible public through a compliant media:
...Congress never approved the bailouts. Given the option to do so explicitly, it declined. The Bush and Obama administrations acted on their own, diverting TARP funds to Detroit regardless of the letter of the law. In Eastwood’s telling, a legally dubious act of executive highhandedness qualifies as patriotic collective action.

By this standard, any initiative of government must be a stirring exercise in people’s power. Remember when we all pulled together to back the solar-panel maker Solyndra to the tune of $500 million? Right now, we are all pulling together to try to force Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives and morning-after abortifacients for their employees. See? There’s nothing we can’t do — together.

What Chrysler and GM desperately needed in their extremity was to go through Chapter 11 reorganization to pare down wages and benefits, shed uneconomical dealerships, and ditch unnecessary brands. When the government got its hooks in them, it politicized this process and threw some $80 billion at the companies. Since we’ll never get an estimated $23 billion back, we all must be “pulling together” behind Detroit still.

Amid all the patriotic piety, Eastwood neglects to mention that Chrysler is now 58.5 percent owned by Fiat, an Italian company. The heart-tugging images of Turin, Italy, apparently were left on the cutting-room floor.

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