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Jonah Goldberg
I watched the Super Bowl in the chilled air of the GFISZ (that's Goldberg Family Ice Station Zebra). Here in Washington, we haven't seen this much snow since at least 1922. The blizzard of 2010 took out our electricity for a day. Digging out from "snowmaggedon" was nothing less than an Augean challenge, though my lower back is, alas, less than Herculean. Meanwhile, snow canceled my daughter's 7th birthday party Saturday and her school Monday. We're slated for another foot by Wednesday.
Suffice it to say I'm not panicking about global warming right now.
Perhaps that's why I was bemused and intrigued by
It's a fascinating commercial. They even got Cheap Trick to rerecord "Dream Police" as "
The pitch involves an "eco roadblock." A man driving an Audi A3 TDI is singled out by an inspector. "We've got a TDI here," he says. "Clean diesel," he adds approvingly.
"You're good to go, sir," the cops inform the driver. The smiling
So, instead of some healthy don't-tread-on-me mockery, the moral of the story is that we should welcome our new green overlords and, if we know what's good for us, surrender to the New Green Order.
Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism or PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that's why the
Meanwhile, some conservatives didn't like it because it makes light of what they believe is actually happening. After all, in America and Europe, the list of environmental crimes is growing at an almost exponential rate. The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as
What was
"The ad only makes sense if it's aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police," writes
But the message is hardly "do the right thing."
To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the
The difference is that
It will be interesting to see whether the ad actually sells cars. The premise only works if you take it as a given that this Gorewellian nightmare is inevitable. But the commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety and surging popular skepticism (according to a
I don't want a car to get past the Green Gestapo. I'm looking for something that can power through the frozen tundra separating me from the supermarket.