Thursday, February 25, 2010

Rant: What's with Pro-Stupidity?

I was reading through the March issue of Lucky magazine last week and came upon an ad that just pissed me off:

Aside from the fact that the ad itself doesn't quite make sense...
Be Stupid? Really Diesel, that's the tagline you're going with now? (It's on the lower right corner of the page there.) Are you trying to say that in this economy it might be stupid to spend as much money as you charge for your products, but that's ok because we should really be striving to be stupid? I think I'll pass.

But what's really disturbing about this to me is that for a while the US seemed to be leaning toward a "be stupid" tagline for itself. All politics aside, nobody seemed to care much that President Bush (W) made up words like "nucular", regularly mispronounced the names of countries, (I-ran instead of Ee-rahn,) and generally had trouble putting a sentence together. That made people feel like he was approachable, they wanted to have a beer with him.

Meanwhile, when Barack Obama hit the scene and began giving some of the best speeches I've ever heard, people criticized him for speaking TOO well. Because he sounded intelligent he was called elitist, and accused of not being able to understand the problems of "real" Americans. The word "intellectual" was used in negative connotation.

But I thought in the last year or so we'd moved beyond that. As verbal flubs exited the headlines, I assumed they also left the realm of desirable attributes.
And now this?!

Come on.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I also saw this ad and was scratching my head about what message they were sending. Still not sure. Good rant, Meg.