i am AT THIS MOMENT reading “slow man” by coetzee that is about an old guy that loses his leg while riding his bike. the fact that Both the ZA and the India “ads” prominently feature amputees was not lost on me. as you may or may not remember, i have a long history of legless friends and relatives. as if this were not enough, the girls and i were comparing the videos and then perusing all the one legged videos on youtube. (death and his 3 legged dog. always a few feet behind him.)

and yes, you Are right. like i said, i was just thinking out loud and feeling a bit embarrassed at how easily manipulated i am by music and image. how vulnerable we all are. this faulty human condition.

i suppose it’s also the fact that i’ve been jerked around by false “niceness” for so long that my suspicion meter knee jerk is on autopilot. perhaps i don’t know the difference anymore. maybe i need discrimination management.

goodnight gracie.

I felt manipulated too, but in a good way. There are other streaming videos from the South Africa Marketing Council here. For fifteen years or so, until 1994, the world effected a successful campaign to boycott the ZA economy and influence them to change their government and their culture away from the shameful apartheid way of life. A measurement of the success of this campaign is found in the web publications of three bloggers I follow… Lynette, Golby, and Rethabile Mesilo.

The social problems shared by South Africans cannot be addressed in a sixty second advert. But we can share acknowledgement of some of the success down there by letting go for a moment and appreciating what they are doing. I have a little consciousness broadening project… to read all the novels of John M. Coetzee. I’ve only read “Disgrace” and I think there is a lot to learn there by reading everything from the seventies to the present.

Interesting to me that you should comment thus, because after I posted, I looked carefully at the American Doll image narrative that you had then just posted, and I was sick at heart with the knowledge that all that weight of history cannot be erased. So there it stood, my feel-good moment re. ZA, juxtaposed with the facts of white colonial oppression, germ warfare and genocide. Not much I could say.

But maybe today, if the rest of the world were to take a close look at the corporations that support the Bush neocon imperium, and if they were to call a boycott of goods and services that support that evil, if they were to do for us what we tried to do to support the end of apartheid, maybe there is a quid pro quo in there somewhere. I would like to stand up proudly for my nation again, to renounce torture and economic empire, to be able to demonstrate the love and respect of the amputee for his country in the Indian national anthem spot.

Here in America we permit Nazis to rally and Fox news to broadcast, all in the name of free speech. When and how can we inform people regarding the outré similarities of the media support for the Bush imperium and the skin-head swastika and leather parades? How can we encounter the hate speech of the Bill O’Reillys and the Rush Limbaughs?

while it is Very Successful at manipulating me emotionally, it sets my alarm bells off… like i’m expecting some kathleen turner-ed voiced minivan ad or a de beers commercial at the end…

see the intel inside deconstruction by phil tagg and India’s National Anthem (which is somehow more “honest”) ad that rangaswami posted not too long ago.

it’s tempting to do a remix with the same v.o. but with other images from south africa. i feel manipulated. thinking out loud.