Tasteless or Typical?
There's been significant buzz in the blogosphere about the tastelessness of equating the famous picture from Iwo Jima with confronting global warming on Time's cover page. See Malkin, Fuzzilicious, Blackfive, and snarky Wonkette that highlight justifiably pissed WWII vets. Does global warming exist? I don't know. I asked the smartest guy I went to college with and he said it's bullshit. Of course he also works for Exxon, so there may be a conflict of interest there. Regardless of climate change, the environment is important, since there's only one of them until we can figure out how to build casinos and strip joints on Mars. But slapping a Sierra Club sticker on your SUV and watching Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" does not require the same fortitude as taking on a determined and well dug-in foe where thousands of your fellow Marines lost their lives.
The whole stance against the Time cover is moot unfortunately, since our consumerist culture, that's heavy on advertising and distorting the public mind, has already ruined tons of iconic images. The flag gets paraded around like a three-dollar whore on every used car commercial in America, velvet Jesuses are sold at the Tijuana border, and vendors sell 9/11 hats at Ground Zero. Collectively, I think we have been jaded. So whether the bravery of Iwo Jima gets used to pitch a political agenda or whether it gets used to sell home insurance is of no consequence. Advertisers would use imagery from Iraq if the war wasn't so unpopular and polarizing. Here's one below I found for hot pants.
(Note: I'm pretty sure I remember this airing, that shit pissed me off!)
No comments:
Post a Comment