Soapbox

My Annual Christmas Rant

I understand that commercials- even the ones that pretend to be- are not realistic.
Charmin features a family of bears, none of whom wear clothes,  with parents who are unwilling to puck up their son’s underpants because they might have poop on them…. but he shows them that, thanks to Charmin, he gets is bottom clean now- and does a dance wherein he waves his naked butt at them to prove it. He doesn’t wear clothes- so why does he have underpants? And did I mention that they are bears?!! Also, they sit bare-assed on upholstered furniture. If they don’t clean properly, dirty underpants are the least of their worries.

Ok, commercials are their own special world. I get that. We tend to tune them out anyway, so when one is so bad that it breaks through the shell, then it starts to bother you every time you have to see it.

Such is the annual Christmas commercial where the wife surprises her husband with a gift of his-and-hers sunglasses, and he takes her outside and surprises her with the gift of his-and-hers massive, luxury pick-up trucks. Surprise! She squeals in delight and runs over and claims… the one that he wanted for himself.

There is SO much wrong with this commercial it’s hard to know where to start, but in 2020, it is a dozen times worse than in other years.

First: who buys someone a car, let alone plunks down $50k for a luxury truck, without letting them drive it and pick the color, options etc. that they want? If you get it wrong, you can’t exactly stand in line to exchange it for the right one the day after Christmas. So it serves him right that she took the color he picked for himself.
This has always bothered me about the “Buy her a car for Christmas” meme where a new ride, tricked out with a 4 foot bow, waits in the driveway to delight the wife and kids.  (Also, do car dealers actually sell those giant bows, ’cause I’ve never seen them in the Christmas section at Target.)

Second: Because we’re not quite shittily, smugly rich enough just putting one car ‘under the tree’, now we’re gonna drop $100k on two vehicles without any need for a family consultation about finances (and regardless of the fact that we clearly don’t need even one pick-up because these folks are NOT the “hauling firewood or scrap salvage” type).
Name me a spouse out there whose first reaction upon seeing that much cash sitting in the drivwway wouldn’t be to say “What the hell did you do?” But no- she runs greedily to claim her prize, like a kid who finds both a chocolate AND a vanilla ice cream cone.

There are always poor people.  I often wonder (sadly, that’s how my brain works) how it feels to see these rich people commercials all day. Because that’s the ad standard: a lifestyle that can’t be maintained on less than a quarter million dollar income to sell laundry detergent. Imagine struggling to make the rent this month because your daughter was sick and you had to miss 2 days of work and seeing “regular folks” depicted as rich. . Commercials may have added some black families and Hispanic families and same-sex families to the mix but they never feature regular, driving a 10 year-old-car, working-class folks.
Christmas ads are one giant smash in the face, reminding most of the country that they are not part of the American dream.

And here’s where 2020 factors in.
We’re entering another lock-down phase (because Covidiots apparently want to die) which means some businesses that had only recently opened will be closing again. There are millions of families with an estimated 18 million children experiencing hunger and facing the possibility of homelessness right at the holidays, and the Republican party refuses to even debate the second Covid relief bill that the House passed months ago. I digress.
Imagine being stuck in your tiny house again with your kids out of school again and you out of work again and your suck-ass Republican congressman too busy packing the court with extremists, insulting people who wear masks and not telling the President to concede the damn election to care about you having nothing to feed your kids for dinner…. and then this truck commercial comes on the TV.

I get it: some people are rich. I know that 10 rich people matter more than 1000 poor ones. That’s not new, or exclusive to the repulsive, consumer economy that is America.
But now? With the life-or-death struggle that millions of your fellow citizens are going through right now, you have to make people feel even worse with commercials like that?
It’s just extra mean.  Nyah-nyah, we’re giving ourselves trucks for Christmas and you’re hoping for a loaf of bread! Shouldn’t have been born poor, fool!
Even the covid-catering commercials are all people “struggling” to deal with working from home “during these challenging times”… so they jump on their very expensive indoor trainer bike to relieve tension.

The rich have theirs, and most of them clearly don’t give a damn about anybody else.