Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Coca-Cola stirs up 'race' storm with Super Bowl ad

In the wake of a Super Bowl advertisement that featured the song America The Beautiful in seven languages, the American soft drink giant appears to have sparked a race war.

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck said the ad was intentionally divisive.  “It's in your face, and if you don't like it, if you're offended by it, you're a racist. If you do like it, you're for immigration. You're for progress. That's all this is: to divide people,” he said.

The ad was also attacked by conservative critics because it features a gay couple hugging their daughter.

First to vent their fury were the Twitterati, with the hashtag #BoycottCoke outpacing #AmericaTheBeautiful before the final whistle had been blown on the Super Bowl.

"America The Beautiful in a language other than English is just wrong,” said one furious Tweeter. “Couldn't make out that song they were singing. I only speak English,” said another.

Others displayed stunning ignorance, lambasting Coke for "desecrating” the US national anthem. America The Beautiful is a patriotic song written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895. The US national anthem is The Star Spangled Banner.

“If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing America the Beautiful in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come, doggone we are on the road to perdition,” one Republican politician-turned-pundit, Allen West, said.

Source

Pushing multiculturalism down people's necks is clearly not popular.  But at least you are allowed to complain -- for the moment.  Why should one view of multiculturalism be attacked and insulted while another is enshined as unshakeably right?  Putnam's studies show that people are much more comfortable among their own kind.  Surely you should be allowed to express that  -- and vote for it.

UPDATE:

Matt Walsh says that the "backlash" against the commercial is mainly a Leftist fiction and that for most  people it was just another boring advertisement to put up with. 

Nonetheless, if I were running Pepsi, I think I would have advertisements out by now saying "We back America" or the like.

7 comments:

Stan B said...

The comments of those who are against this Coke Commercial are, in my opinion, terribly misguided. I thought it was a celebration of 1st generation immigrants - people who can't speak the language - wanting the promise of the American Dream for themselves and their children. Most who came here in the past couldn't speak the native language, but they shared the Dream, and even now they do so. To react badly to their expression of that love of America and the Dream shows rank intolerance. It also discourages them from assimilating, which is the goal of America, isn't it? Shouldn't we be such a wonderful culture that people WANT to join us - in language, in the Dream and, dare I say it, in Song?

Use the Name, Luke said...

E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one.

America is a nation which gets its strength from the diversity of immigrant skills and cultures. So in that sense it's appropriate to have the commercial use multiple languages to represent the "many" of the motto.

On the other hand, unity is necessary for the country to survive, never mind thrive. I'm willing to give the ad creators the benefit of the doubt that the characters singing the same song can represent the unity of the motto.

Still, keeping multiple languages and not learning English doesn't lead to unity, it leads to division. After all, if you can't even talk to each other, how can achieve any kind of agreement?

Come to think of it, I frequently feel that way when I attempt to communicate with people on the left. We're both supposedly using English, but it's amazing how often they have entirely different meanings for the same words.

Anonymous said...

This ad was not made for USA consumers, but to push the coke brand to those who aspire to the American dream. Coke has exploited this stratigy for years because their market share continues to erode in the USA.

MDH

Anonymous said...

Isn't English also the language of immigrants to America?

Anonymous said...

Someone ask la Raza about English and assimilation.

That said, this is not the 1800s and none of those scenes were Ellis Island. Nineteenth century (legal) immigrants couldn't wait to learn English and become American. Not so much anymore. Seems like America must become balkanized havens of home-away-from-home for illegal immigrants. All in the name of PC multiculturalism.

Anonymous said...

Yes, this is clear about immigration in western Europe as well as the US. It's just about creating enclave communities from the original homelands (aka neo-colonization) and sometimes taking over whole districts of a city or a region, and only making the minimum "assimilation" in order to maximize the benefits of the immigration, while also pressing for special concessions from the host society (most notable in the case of muslim organizations).

Anonymous said...

I despise multiculturalism nonsense being forced down our throats. However, the commercial showed people of many cultural backgrounds celebrating America instead of spewing the usual liberal nonsense about how bad America is. I found that very refreshing and it reminded me of the old "Melting pot" reference to American immigrants joining together in our society.