America at its Beautifullest

Last night’s Super Bowl was extremely America-y, even for the Super Bowl. Maybe because it was Fox’s turn to host this year? Or maybe people are just more into America than they were last year! But the whole spectacle—taped pregame segments, songs, the game, the commercials, all of it—was one big, sloppy, desperate appeal to America as a means of selling consumer goods, including the game itself. What a scheme!

Around 5:50 EST, when your Baffler blogger turned the television to Fox, something glorious happened. The network aired a montage of professional football players—surrounded by firemen, police, soldiers, etc.—reading the Declaration of Independence, line for line. There was the viewer, with a bag of bacon-ranch Cheetos atop the potbelly, watching as Adrian Peterson or Aaron Rodgers shit-talked King George III.

The #brands were only beginning their leg-humping of America. A Budweiser ad showed an American soldier returning to his hometown on the Budweiser Clydesdales’s carriage. Bob Dylan—who at this point can do whatever he wants, sure—starred in a two-minute ad for Chrysler that included the actual line, “Is there anything more American than America?” No, Bob, there certainly is not. Halftime performer Bruno Mars, whose songs have nothing to do with America as far as we can tell, sang and danced before monitors displaying the red, white, and blue of the American flag.

Why is “America” still such a powerful image to latch onto in 2014? Most Americans, after all, spend their time these days bitching about what a terrible hellhole this place has become, whether over its insane income disparities or lousy work ethic (versus CHINA!) or trashy pop culture offerings or the Obama-led communist takeover. The goal for advertisers and producers, then, is to appeal mostly to sentimental ideals of aspirational America—nothing that offers any sort of realistic depiction of America in its present iteration.

Except for the Coca-Cola ad. (Or at least one of Coca-Cola’s ten million ads.) It is, like all ads, terrible. It features people singing “America the Beautiful.” Ho-hum. But they’re singing it . . . in a variety of languages!

Wild guess here: Coca-Cola produced this ad so as to appeal to as many people as possible and thusly increase profits. Nothing to get too worked up about, and yet, I knew the instant someone started singing in a different language, some people would get worked up about it. Search the #boycottcoke hashtag on Twitter or the comments on Coke’s Facebook page if you’d like. Or just read former congressman Allen West as he gets worked up about it:

I’m watching the Super Bowl, looks like good defense (Seattle) is trouncing good offense (Denver) when a Coca Cola commercial came on and it started rather patriotically with the words of “America the Beautiful.”

Then the words went from English to languages I didn’t recognize . . .

. . . I am quite sure there may some who appreciated the commercial, but Coca Cola missed the mark in my opinion. If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing “American the Beautiful” in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come — doggone we are on the road to perdition. This was a truly disturbing commercial for me, what say you?

So we’re hearing “America America America, rah rah rah” all night, usually presented with images from America’s past, and then one commercial hints at multilingualism and multiculturalism in America, and we have a Controversy on our hands.

It’s much more likely that future-America will be defined by multilingualism than it will be by a thriving Chrysler automobile company. That future frightens some people. Don’t show it, brands. It must never be seen!