Like many people, my family held a Superbowl party with friends (and my signature Chili dish) to watch both the game and the commercials. The group is about evenly divided between which is the greater draw, though with a relatively dull game the commercials took on a heightened level of scrutiny. The commercials were not a bumper crop this year but there were a few particularly funny spots. I liked the Doritos baby commercial, the Christopher Walkin commercial, the Willem Dafoe/Snickers commercial and the Prius commercial the most. They are posted below. However, NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading advocacy group on the issue of abortion, quickly sent out tweets denouncing various commercials in an apparent effort to show critics that the organization is truly incapable of humor or restraint at such moments.
The group first singled out the Hyundai commercial featuring comedian Kevin Hart, which I thought was pretty funny:
Here is NARAL’s response:
“Hey, @Hyundai – taking away your daughter’s autonomy and stalking her on a date isn’t funny. #NotBuyingIt #SB50”
NARAL then went after the Doritos commercial:
The problem? “Humanizing fetuses” even though this looked like a fully grown baby.
Then NARAL went after the very funny Snickers commercial below as “transphobic”:
So it appears other people watch the Superbowl for the commercials, though NARAL sits there with a cellphone waiting to tweet the first offense or insult that it can spot:
“NARAL @NARAL
.@SNICKERS, what was up w that commercial? Transphobic & implies women OK w being objectified as long as they have snacks #NotBuyingIt #SB50
6:58 PM – 7 Feb 2016”
They seemed to not let a funny commercial get by without finding something to denounce in it. It was the hilarious “Walken Closet” spot.
Nothing can be that funny without being terribly insulting. I would suggest denouncing the Kia Optima as advancing a beigist stereotype and being beigophobic.
Even the spot showing the throwing of a wedding bouquet prompted an angry NARAL tweet:
“Really, @Buick? Women fighting over a wedding bouquet? That was the best you could come up with? #NotBuyingIt #SB50”
What is fascinating is that the woman tosses away to the bouquet at the end of the commercial.
Just for the record, I also liked the Prius commercial below:
Some tweets seemed to be a parody of itself in seeking any basis to object. For example, the car commercial featuring an astronaut received this furious tweet:
“NARAL @NARAL
.@Audi – you couldn’t find a single female astronaut to feature in your ad? #NotBuyingIt #SB50
7:13 PM – 7 Feb 2016”
There is of course the ability to support pro-choice causes and still have a sense of humor and a modicum of social perspective. What is interesting is that, even if one accepts that NARAL is not where one looks for humor, these attacks would seem to undermine its credibility and connection with the vast majority of people. However, like PETA attacks, these criticisms are clearly meant to resonate with a narrow band of the population. It is possible to see these ads in a different light, but that is clearly not possible if you view everything through a self-fulfilling and hyper-sensitive lens. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said “[t]he overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.” He of course never saw the comedic critiques of NARAL.
Want something offensive, distasteful and disgusting? How about a tribute to cop-killers?
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Reflections on the Panthers
A look back at what the Black Panthers did to deserve Beyoncé’s rousing tribute at the Super Bowl.
February 10, 2016
John Perazzo
Beyoncé Knowles. Everyone knows her simply as Beyoncé, the multi-talented superstar wife of music-industry legend Jay Z. She’s also the glamorous and magnetic “Bey,” as President Barack Obama affectionately calls her. She’s held fundraisers for the President, performed at the White House, and cultivated a warm friendship with both Mr. and Mrs. Obama. Beyoncé often turns up at NBA basketball games, where she and her hubby can typically be seen in their courtside seats, soaking up the love of starstruck fans, broadcasters, and ballplayers alike. This past Sunday, as part of the Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé put on a performance that served as an ode to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. Her all-black female backup dancers proudly donned the Panthers’ signature black berets atop their ’60s Afro hairstyles, and emphatically raised their fists in the Panthers’ famous Black Power salute. In light of the passion with which so many screaming youngsters in attendance rocked and gyrated orgasmically to Beyoncé’s every move and word, it’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly who the Black Panthers were, and what did they do to deserve such a tribute from the lovely Bey.
The Black Panther Party was born as an outgrowth of the Oakland, California street gang of Huey Newton, a 24-year-old man whose only prior discernible achievements had been as a vicious thug, thief, and pimp. To define the Panthers’ mission, Newton in 1966 drafted a Ten-Point Program charging that because America’s “racist government” had collaborated with “the capitalists” to “rob” the “Black Community” blind, that same government was now morally “obligated,” as a form of restitution, to give all blacks “employment or a guaranteed income” as well as taxpayer-funded “land, bread, housing, education, [and] clothing” until the end of time. Moreover, Newton argued that “all Black people should be released from … jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.” He also issued a call for blacks to “arm themselves for self-defense,” which was in fact an incitement to a race war. As Panther “minister of culture” Emory Douglas put it in 1970: “The only way to make this racist U.S. government administer justice to the people it is oppressing, is … by taking up arms against this government, killing the officials, until the reactionary forces … are dead, and those that are left turn their weapons on their superiors.”
In a similarly impassioned speech in the late Sixties, Panther member David Hilliard denounced “racist, fascist America” as a loathsome country “run by a slave oligarchy and brigandish criminals.” He condemned contemporary white people and their collective forefathers as “genocidal murderers,” “enslavers,” and “exploiters” of the lowest order. And for good measure, Hilliard dismissed “the whole damn” Constitution as a document that was “invalid in regards to Blacks in particular.”
Portraying law-enforcement officers as the indisputably racist agents of a racist nation, the Panthers regularly tried to defy and provoke police—“pigs,” as they contemptuously called them—by appearing in public places carrying loaded firearms. On May 2, 1967, for instance, more than two-dozen Panthers brandishing guns famously walked into a meeting of the California State Assembly to protest a proposed piece of legislation. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver acknowledged years later (in 1986): “We [Panthers] would go out and ambush cops, but if we got caught we would blame it on them and claim innocence.”
Of course, ambushing the police wasn’t the only thing the Panthers knew how to do. They also perfected the fine arts of dealing drugs, pimping prostitutes, extorting money, stealing property, beating people senseless, and on at least a dozen occasions, committing homicide. In 1969 alone, Panther members were arrested 348 times for murder, armed robbery, rape, and burglary. How often did they commit these and other serious crimes without getting arrested? That’s anybody’s guess.
Because the Panthers hated America, they naturally detested capitalism and revered Communism. David Hilliard, for one, lauded the many graces of “Marxism-Leninism.” Eldridge Cleaver once wrote that “if you look around the world, you will see that the only countries which have liberated themselves and managed to withstand the tide of counter-revolution are precisely those countries that have strongly Marxist-Leninist parties.” The Panthers made Mao Zedong’s iconic Red Book required reading for all their members, and sold copies of it to students at UC Berkeley to raise funds for the purchase of shotguns. And for guidance in how to establish revolutionary socialism in the United States, the Panthers studied the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Frantz Fanon. Historian John Patrick Diggins writes that the Panthers “adopted a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ amalgam that succeeded in combining nationalism with socialism, preaching self-determination along with class struggle.”
The Panthers maintained that blacks were little more than prisoners of an “internal colony” in America, a colony whose liberation could be effectuated only by armed revolution. Tom Hayden, the New Left radical who founded the Students for a Democratic Society and fully expected that a race war would soon engulf the United States, admiringly dubbed the Panthers as “America’s Vietcong”—likening them to the Communist guerrillas who were killing U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. In September 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Panthers as the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Much more recently, historian Ronald Radosh described them as “a group of Stalinist thugs who murdered and killed both police and their own internal dissenters.” And in a Sixty Minutes interview in 1997, none other than Eldridge Cleaver conceded: “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.”
These, then, were the Black Panthers. These were the anarchic, murderous barbarians whom Beyoncé chose to honor as voices of “justice” during her insipid Super Bowl halftime performance. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than the grotesque glorification of racism—a politically correct brand.
The power of the sonogram–even when used for humor by a tortilla chip company it is difficult not to notice the humanity.
This is why Pro-Life groups have trucks driving around offering free sonograms to potential abortion minded individuals and why Pro-Choice groups such as NARAL cry foul.
The continual advance of science and medicine is no friend to the cause of abortion rights.
If you are bent, you are bent. You are bent all the way. From your first speech by Gloria to your last dying day.
I am sick unto death of these people and their self-inflicted problems.
The lunatics euphemistically referred to as: ‘transsexuals’, are delusional. The other groups are unaware that there are only two rights:-
1) the right to keep all of your income, all of your possessions and all of your property (of whatever nature).
2) the right to live as you please.
There is no such thing as the right to tell a company how to conduct its business. There is no obligation on the part of human detritus to buy the products of a company the policies of which are repugnant to them. Neither should a company become a whore to those who threaten it with a boycott.
NARAL is insignificant. I sorrowfully give the organization a smidgeon of legitimacy by even mentioning it here.
Transphobic: what is that? I am an old guy. I know words like Trans Atlantic and Trans World Airlines. Is this about fear of flying on old planes?
Where the boys are. That is why Naral goes there. Right Gloria?
Darren, LOL! Fun w/ acronyms.DaFoe was good. The Bud Light ad w/ Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen was lame, and a waste of talent. Bud Light should be banned. Their beer sucks and their ad company must be kicking back big time because their ads are consistently STUPID. But, maybe that’s the plan since only stupid people drink Bud Light.
Football players are auguring early from TBI while their heirs, NFL club owners, league commissioners and their workforces, medical staffs, the Medical profession as a whole fiddle.
Notice how there wasn’t a word from the announcing crew of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms when the back of Corey Brown’s head slammed into the turf and he got up, nor when he got up and almost fell back down. Certainly the NFL wanted us to know how easy it is to receive a traumatic brain injury, just not when it happened. After all, it was the Fiftieth Edition of the Super Bowl Extravaganza.
As it was, we learned about it sort of by surprise. Oh, wow, Corey Brown is in the locker room having received what is believed to be a concussion.
NARWHAL, (National Abortion Rights Without Humor Action League), needs to just chill out, “drink a lot of Budweiser” and watch the game.
For me the Willem Dafoe ad was best. When watching, and seeing the legs at first, I said to my wife “that looks like a guy’s legs” then they scrolling up to see Willem Dafoe as Marilyn Monroe, that was for me the best moment of the entire Superbowl. I immediately thought of one of the Boondock Saints movies where he disturbingly dresses like a woman and infiltrates the enemy’s lair, and the general context of Dafoe’s character. They could not have chosen a better man to play a surly Marilyn Monroe.
bettykath has nothing but derision for us. She has the Steinem attitude.
steve, Cam was dismissive of the Broncos victory and walked out of the presser in a huff.
Sidebar: The Bronco’s defense is either the best defense in the history of all infinity or that game was fixed. It’s funny that Jessica Savitch’s last report, before her uncanny and untimely lethal “automobile accident,” was on a Mob meeting in Acapulco. Why in God’s name did Cam Newton hesitate, stop and back away from the football he had just fumbled? The photo of Cam Newton staring down at the football should be displayed in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
John [- my take on Newton standing there was he either thought the ball would be ruled an incomplete pass or he was in shock. Take your pick.
Who knows who was behind the tweets supposedly sent on behalf of this organization….probably a few humorless “leaders” sitting around looking for something to be offended by. I’m not familiar with the NARAL organization, but I can’t imagine that this tweeter speaks for the majority. Most pro-choice people seek to preserve the rights of women to autonomy and bodily integrity for first trimester pregnancies. This ad depicted an obviously full-term fetus. Although from a marketing standpoint, I’m not sure why Doritos would want to venture into such a controversial area.
These ads are created by the politicians who claim to speak for the Native Americans. They no more reflect the average N.I. than Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton are representative of the average black American. I’m sure the CEOs of these political organizations live in lovely homes in the leafy Washington D.C. suburbs. They are college educated and probably no more than 25% N.A. They are looking for an issue to keep the funding coming in. Some of the team names such as Braves at least represent a proud heritage. I don’t know how much of the “warrior” image is Hollywood myth making. The Indians I grew up around were rather pathetic. They seemed fairly passive, beset by poverty, government dependency, alcoholism and high rates of suicide. Some of them did prosper. I remember some of the women going to two or four year colleges and becoming social workers, teachers, police officers, etc. The men, unfortunately, were uniformally hopeless.
Now, regarding fetuses and NARAL, the other issue with that ad, was that the woman truly wanted, loved her pregnancy and her baby. It’s an extremist view of abortion to demand that we refer to her baby as a fetus and not by default grant it humanity.
Bettykath:
That was an awesome commercial, although I was surprised by the end.
There’s no consensus among Indian tribes regarding the Redskins, and Native American mascots in general.
Personally, I associate the Redskins with fond memories of watching football as a kid back East with my Dad. I would find the removal of Native American team names to be erasing Native Anerican references in a large part of our culture.
Does “redskin” mean the same as the “N” word today? I have not heard it used such. To me, “redskin” is an old fashioned word that brings to mind a brave Indian. It did not have a negative connotation for me. But I am not a member of a tribe. No one calls Native Americans “redskins” today, unless you’re a member of a tribe and it’s a term of affection.
For me, it comes down to a question of if the name is a slur. If there was a sports team called the “N” word, then break speed records getting rid of it. Is “redskins” also a slur? It’s up to Native Americans to decide, because they are the ones affected. Right now, there is no consensus. They need to decide. If they do come to a consensus that they want the Redskins renamed, then I hope they come up with an even better (but pronounceable!) Native American name.
What if the Redskins, and the Braves, and all the other Native American references in sports teams names get replaced with the ubiquitous animal mascots. No more Native American references. Is that a gain or a loss for our first residents?
I hope they don’t go overboard and remove all references to Native Americans.
And on another note, they need to get rid of the Rez paradigm, which has been an unmitigated disaster. It illustrates how permanent government assistance and lack of opportunity is no panacea. Government does not do well at taking care of people.
http://mmqb.si.com/2014/04/03/washington-nfl-team-name-debate
As is the case with games based on defense and life based on defense, boring.
Nick:
Thanks for the tip about Anthony Hopkins. I missed that commercial. Most people hate sitting at the mechanic shop for an airbag recall but I’m ecstatic about the free wifi. I can watch videos! I just saw that TurboTax commercial online and Sir Anthony was marvelous.
I know this thread is a diss of NARAL, but there was a terrific ad:
https://youtu.be/mR-tbOxlhvE