HT: Joanna G.

Florence King reflects upon the short life of a new commercial:

[The ad] goes like this: Two young men are in a grocery checkout. The first is buying tofu, organic veggies, and skim milk. Directly behind him in the line is the second young man, whose basket is full of beef ribs, potato chips, and pizza. The sight of all that macho fare makes the first young man cringe in shame and sends him straight to the GM dealership where he buys a Hummer on the spot. As he’s driving away in it, smiling proudly, the message “Restore Your Manhood” flashes on the screen.

Even I did a double-take the first time 1 saw it. My instant analysis, that it was a masterpiece of self-parody, lasted all of two seconds before I came to my senses. American automakers are so constitutionally incapable of self-parody

Everything about the Hummer is over-the-top, approaching self-parody, even the decision to market it under the appellation “Hummer.”

More interesting to me was King’s descriptiong of male bloggers’ reaction to the ads. No doubt John Hood has had encounters with the kind of online writing King describes:

… nothing more than an adolescent cleverness contest couched in a monotonous stream of obscenities that pulsated with brutal, mocking anger. … It all boiled down to the S-word, the F-word, and a list of everybody and everything that sucks … It had nothing to do with the Hummer ad. It was Web Rage, virtually indistinguishable from every other site treating of a controversial subject: the same tightly wound frustration, the same vicious outbursts, the same inarticulate vulgarity, and the same overabundance of males revealing the same things about themselves that they reveal in similar eruptions of Road Rage. American young men are mad, as mad as hell, but they have little choice about whether to take it anymore. Products of a society that views adult manhood as a politically incorrect threat to be held up to ridicule and rendered inadequate, they are incapable of the towering rage of Lear or the baleful imprecations of Achilles. Infantilized by a hostile culture, they cannot rise above the sputtering, foot- stamping tantrums of Rumpelstiltskin.