Longtime readers of Kiko's House are well acquainted with my rants about General Motors, which has done the impossible by transforming itself from an innovative global auto manufacturing colossus into an beggarly maker of gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs and boring rental cars.So my pump already was primed when I sat down to watch the Philadelphia Eagles-Dallas Cowboys last weekend and an ad for the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck came on showing a montage of American moments, including Rosa Parks on a bus, Martin Luther King preaching, soldiers slogging through a Vietnam jungle, Richard Nixon waving as he left office, the Hurricane Katrina floods, the two towers of light commemorating 9/11 . . . as the announcer, accompanied by John Mellencamp, intoned, "This is our country. This is our truck. The all-new Chevy Silverado."Am I the only one to take offense at this grand theft larceny of sacred images to sell a truck that is not new at all by a company that is unable to reinvent itself, is bleeding market share like a stuck pig and will soon be overtaken by Toyota?
I've got plenty of company, says Seth Stevenson in a trenchant analysis of the TV ad in Slate. In giving the ad a big fat grade of "D," Stevenson notes that:
"An early version of the ad included footage of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Well, that would have brightened things up. I wonder if they could squeeze in the Rodney King beating and the Abu Ghraib photos, too."
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