Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Speaking of advertising

That Clint Eastwood ad. It's puzzling a lot of people. For example:
I just watched the ad seconds ago, after reading about the Republican freak-out, which I have to say is bizarre. This is the exact sort of gauzy nationalism (to paraphrase Jonathan Chait) that corporations have put out for years and Republicans have, themselves, often alluded to. This is the America of their imaginations and to see them lambasting it, evidently for name-checking Detroit and softly alluding to the bail-out, really displays a party that actually isn't.
That's Ta-Nehisi Coates, yes, he is a regularly recurring subject here. And I should admit I am puzzled by Coates in similar ways. I read him regularly and I see contradictions in his claims about hip hop. Everything the guy stands for, and Coates really stands for stuff, is the opposite of hip hop. And he lets that slip now and then. But he keeps defending it. He has a sort of gauzy affection for it.

But he has perfectly good reasons for liking the stuff he does like and I can understand that being Quebecois. Particularly being a mix of pur laine French Quebecois on one side and dyed in the wool Irish on the other. There are attitudes embodied in that culture are just so self-defeating that I want to chuck it all. Except that it is my culture and there are historical reasons it is the way it is. And even when you pile up all the contradictions, those reasons are often still good reasons.

And the same is true of American conservatives and the Clint Eastwood ad. You have to understand the seeming contradictions not as simply contradictions but rather see the deeper thing they point to.

I'll say more about this next Monday but it all comes down to this line:
... but after those trails, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one ...
Yeah, that sounds like it ought to be palatable to conservatives but it isn't. There are historical reasons why conservatives reject that notion. Yeah, they think, we all rallied around and fought external threats to liberty but that isn't quite the same thing as rallying around what is right and acting as one.

Liberty is a particular word and it is used in particular ways. It means something like freedom but not exactly the same thing. It is, as many have said before me, more of a negative concept. And to say "acted as one" is not only not liberty, it can be a threat to it.

Much more come Monday.

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