Monday, August 9, 2010

Ron Johnson TV Ad Features Non-People Leaving Not-Wisconsin

Since we're going to nit-pick over metaphors here, I'm sure the right will be just as outraged to learn that Ron Johnson used non-people in one of his earlier advertisements:
Yeah, that family moving out of the house and hitting the road in search of greener pastures in the stock footage at 0:06 and 0:20 are actors(!) who emote and pantomime gestures so as to convey a message to an audience. They're not real people. They aren't moving. They're probably not even related.

In fact, they're not even playing people from Wisconsin. As the trailer rides off into the ominous future ahead, it has what appears to be a Michigan license plate:
Here's something for the sake of the comparison:
And the Wisconsin plate we all know and live with:
So, Ron Johnson's actors (a.) are just as real as the name tag he's devoting so much energy critiquing, and (b.) aren't even playing characters from Wisconsin.

Thank you very much, talk radio, for finding an utterly meaningless issue to obsess over. And kudos to the the Johnson campaign for being big enough to let small, non-issues like this slide.

Oh, my bad ...
MORE: Lest the point we're trying to make above isn't clear enough, let's remove any tone of irony from what we're trying to say: it doesn't matter at all the Johnson used actors in his commercials. In fact, it matters as little as there being a lack of person to correspond to a name written on a prop used in Feingold's ad. The average TV-viewer is smart enough to know that sometimes fake things are intended to represent real things without necessarily having spent a semester studying the theory of mimesis.

There's really just no sense in complaining about either issue above. I'm sure the Johnson campaign will counter by saying that it's an indication of just how little Feingold cares about jobs, but only the simplest fool would believe such an incredible pile of bullshit.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin's talk radio clique and the Johnson campaign really don't think very much of voters. This is not a new problem among conservatives, nor do I expect it to end any time soon.

2 comments:

Zach W. said...

Nicely done. This is 100% a contrived controversy.

Stewie said...

Just another day's work when it comes to Bloggers and Radioheads on both sides.