Elegant Aggression?!

While watching commercials my children and I play a game to overcme the tedium – what is this advertising? Sometimes it is clear from the start, advertisments for detergents tend not to mess around, but often one doesn’t know what is being hawked until the end. It’s a contest of course, and when I have absoltuely no idea I usually guess ‘cars’. More than most products, cars sell image more than content; style more than engineering

Recently I saw an ad for an Acura during a sporting event. it started with a football player undressing and then redressing into a suit. A voice then said, “we can do it with people, why not with cars?” which even now makes little sense to me. Then came the line that has troubled me. “The new Acura, aggression at its most elegant.”

What is that? What is elegant about aggression? Is that punching someone but with good form? Tearing into someone but with style? Waterboarding with Perrier? Advertisers don’t casually come up with this stuff. People are paid much more than I am to weedle out such amazing combinations of words. The audience is men and you know that some big bucks reasearch went into discerning that men are filled with latent aggression, so why not capitalize on it. Do you see why this troubles me?

I remember in the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller when the crews went up over Italy to bomb the Nazis; the Major didn’t care about what was destroyed – the actual success of the mission – he just wanted to see a good and even bomb pattern becasue that’s what his superiors wanted. Now I have a name for that – elegant aggression. I am also reminded of smart bombs and drones.

There is nothing elegant about aggression and violence. It hurts people. The last thing we need our young men hearing subliminally is that aggression is cool if you can do it with style.

One of the tasks of the church with young people is to offer a different vision of the world and what it can be. In order to do that we have to be very discerning about what the wrong message is – to point it out and rage against it. If we aren’t doing this, who will? Pastor Jim