Althouse

Radio personality Howard Stern said he’s “dumbfounded” at all the hullabaloo, wondering on air, with regard to Kid Rock and [Travis] Tritt, “Why do you care so much?” ...

Anheuser-Busch, which is getting a ton of earned media out of this, appears to largely be riding the wave.... 

“These are tough brands to find growth for — Bud Light has been shedding barrels of volume for years. It’s past its prime, it will not be the largest beer in the country much longer,” [said beer columnist Dave Infante]. “This is standard-issue pinkwashing stuff. They’re looking for ways to quote-unquote align their values with customer segments that they think maybe they can still find some loyalty in.”... 

"Pinkwashing" connotes that the effort is superficial and fake. That is, it's advertising. There's no serious commitment to underlying principles. 

"Why do you care so much?" — Stern asked — but the advertiser is always asking you to care — care, but only just enough. Don't under- or over-care. Care the amount that makes you like the product and want to buy it. It's hard to calibrate! Remember when Pepsi miscalculated?*

Some of that traditional core audience, even though it’s not growing, feels betrayed by Bud Light’s LGBTQ outreach and alliance, however small, with a trans woman. They feel like it’s gone “woke,” like another part of the country’s culture is changing around them in a way that’s uncomfortable. 

“You’re talking about a demographic that’s drinking that beer here locally that’s about as far from that as you can get. You’re talking about some blue-collar working men. Women don’t drink that beer a lot or just in general, and sure, they just kind of struck a nerve with their base, potentially,” Don, the liquor store owner, said.

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* See "Pepsi Pulls Ad Accused of Trivializing Black Lives Matter" (2017, NYT).  

Pepsi has apologized for a controversial advertisement that borrowed imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement, after a day of intense criticism from people who said it trivialized the widespread protests against the killings of black people by the police.... 

The ad, posted to YouTube on Tuesday, shows attractive young people holding milquetoast signs with nonspecific pleas like “Join the conversation.” The protesters are uniformly smiling, laughing, clapping, hugging and high-fiving. In the ad’s climactic scene, a police officer accepts a can of Pepsi from Kendall Jenner, a white woman, setting off raucous approval from the protesters and an appreciative grin from the officer. 

1. You know how Mom just loves to sit outside at the restaurant.

2. Vying for the title Best Ginger. 

3. Singing all the parts.

4. "Can we play dead yet?"

5. The difference between the South and the Midwest. 

6. That girl who just got engaged.

7. That fake Coke everyone's making.

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

IN THE summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road—Olney’s, eighteen miles south—but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth–century lives.

“Think people! How do we appeal to the younger generation while sending a positive message?"  

“Let’s make a video game character become sentient at the sound of a coke being opened in the real world in the middle of a bloody battle and have him lay down his arms in the name of peace.”  

“Fuck yeah.”  

How in the fuck did that ever make it past initial pitch? 

For once, I am not annoyed — I am the opposite of annoyed — by the ad YouTube served up in front of the video I wanted to watch: 

Well, that's just great. Good to know the beloved dead man is refreshed. 

There is a Bible verse about tending to the thirst of a dead man: "And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'" 

Yet no one pictures Bob Ross in hell. It is more likely that you would picture him in a Heaven that resembles his paintings, and I'm sure that picture has abundant water features, with painterly tree reflections. Still, you weren't picturing Paradise with soda, were you? Maybe you were! There's that song about Paradise with cigarette trees and a soda water fountain.

Now to the serious business of this post, the "Repo Man" clip: 

That's the pine-tree-shaped air freshener that the repo man will find in every repossessed car. I needed to look up that clip because I was about to read the NYT article, "Why Police Can Stop Motorists With Air Fresheners Hanging in Their Cars/A majority of states have laws making it illegal to hang anything from a rearview mirror that obscures a driver’s view. But critics say the laws are often used as pretexts." 

I haven't read the article yet, but I'd say that hanging something from the rearview mirror is an activity associated with the lower class. There's a bit of a safety issue, but it's easy to suspect that these laws justify traffic stops of people the police might want to intrude upon. And we have a recent incident in which a young man was shot to death, apparently by accident, after he was stopped, we were originally told, for having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.

Now, I've read the article. I'd summarize it like this. There's a legitimate, though fairly small, safety issue, but not every car with something hanging from the rearview mirror is stopped, so there is room for racial animus to play a role in who is stopped and how that person is treated after they are stopped.

The article ends with an anecdote about a woman who, at 35 years of age, still feels traumatized by a traffic stop over an air freshener that happened when she was in high school:

“He kept asking me questions like he wanted to trip me up,” said Ms. Mixon, who is Black....

“If I get in a car with somebody and they have something hanging from their mirror, I’m like, ‘Can you take that down?’” Ms. Mixon said. “Being a Black passenger might trigger something in a racist cop, so let’s just remove that altogether from the situation.”

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There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"... and ended up three miles away from where she first began, surviving on a can of ginger ale she discovered unopened along the way. Police are trying to determine if the woman was actually underground for three weeks. They say the health officials they have consulted believe it is more likely the woman was only in the sewer for two or three days. 'We don’t feel that there was any crime committed,' Ted White, a police spokesperson, said. 'But the biggest question is, is her story credible? Was she actually down there the whole time?'"

From "Naked woman rescued from Florida sewer after driver hears her screaming/Delray Beach fire rescue says woman sustained superficial injuries and had been reported missing three weeks earlier" (The Guardian).