Entries Tagged 'Media' ↓

If you’re an adult Black person, you’ve probably had the following experience more than once:

You’re walking down the street, or a supermarket aisle, or an office hallway, when you recognize a white friend or colleague—someone with whom you’ve had fairly regular, or even recent, contact—coming toward you from the opposite direction. Your face warms expectantly as you get closer to them, only to have them go right past you, often after glancing directly at you in your face.

You then turn around and call out their name. They stop, look at you, then burst into smiles and recognition. “I didn’t notice it was you!”, they apologize.

Sound familiar?

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You know the “My Talking Stain” commercial for Tide-to-Go that ran during the Super Bowl, and has been widely circulated since?

In it, a guy is interviewing for a job, but while answering questions, a stain on his shirt—it looks like java—sprouts a mouth and starts talking gibberish. It does this so incessantly that it overwhelms the prospective employer’s attention and completely drowns out the interviewee.

This funny ad urges consumers to buy Tide’s portable stain removing pen and not let the messes on their clothes send an unintended message. In fact, the spot’s so good, I only noticed on, maybe, the third viewing, a little bit of disclaimer text, right at the end:

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If you convinced about two hundred people to make the background noise of an excited TV studio audience, then yelled this set of otherwise unassociated nouns at one of your closest friends…

Farmers Markets!

Standing Still at Concerts!

Japan!

Arrested Development!

Awareness!

Hating their parents!

Marathons

Mos Def!

…passing Plutonians could be forgiven for thinking they’d tuned into the latest edition of the new and recapitalized $1,000,000 Pyramid.

But they wouldn’t have. They’d just be hearing someone reading from Christian Lander’s hilarious new blog, StuffWhitePeopleLike (SWPL). (Thanks to writer Robert Morales for sending the link.)

Each of its (thus far) seventy-six entries, starting with “Coffee,” and going, apparently in no particular order, to “Bottles of Water,” captures some aspect of the dominant culture’s fascinating peccadilloes, lightly narrating the reasons why white people can’t get enough of living by the water (#51), snowboarding (#31), Michel Gondry (#68), or, sigh, difficult breakups (#70):

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It’s redundant for Michael Bay to send up his image, as he does in this Verizon FiOS commercial. It’s even superfluous to make the observation.

Two things I love about this piece, though:

1) The framed picture of a fiery explosion on the living room wall behind him.

2) That, on the detonation right after he says, “Awesome barbecue!”, hardened Michael Bay, director of Armageddon, Bad Boys 1 & 2, Pearl Harbor, The Rock, and Transformers—the Prince of Powder Kegs, who brushes his teeth with gunpowder, and uses lit dynamite for romantic candles—Michael Bay, on that detonation, succumbs to the fireball’s startling, concussive force, can’t help it, and blinks.

I’m not proud, because a) I take Proverbs 16:18’s counsel (“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”) to be flawless, and b) I try not to cultivate feelings about abstractions.

This even though, according to my calculations, I’m exactly six weeks older than Michelle Obama. Because I’ve had an adult life just a bit longer than she has, you’d think I would have had time to develop some form of her pride by now.

Let’s do a week-in-review-style wrap-up on what she said last week in Madison WI, on Monday, February 18:

“What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something — for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”

Now, she also spoke in Milwaukee, earlier that day. In that speech, she said:

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

Note the absence of the word really, above, in the earlier speech: proud vs. really proud. (Some have made a point of her later inclusion of that adverb, during her second, Madison speech.)

Here’s a link to a clip comparing the two.

What to make of this?

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