An interesting thing happened during an interesting fourth quarter of an already interesting Super Bowl on Sunday night: I felt the urge to get some dirt on my hands.
Thanks to Dodge, the voice of Paul Harvey and some of the most clever and emotional advertising we’ve seen in years, we got a clear winner of the Super Bowl ad wars and a really, really good commercial that wasn’t just selling a product, but doing so much more.
It was causing us to think.
After a weird power outage in the Mercedes Benz Superdome during the early moments of the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII, the Baltimore Ravens saw their momentum evaporate as the San Francisco 49ers nearly eliminated a 22-point deficit, before pulling out a victory in a thrilling finish. And it was then, as the game came down to crunch time, on a night with all these interesting stories and subplots, that something much more interesting, impactful and profound occurred.
God made a farmer, Dodge made a commercial and America made its growing division all the more evident.
[You can view the video by clicking here].
The culture war in America became even more evident in the moments following Dodge’s two-minute, still picture and old voice-over ad. Just examine the reactions to the spot itself. Half the country probably had tears in their eyes while the other half were rolling their eyes. Some thought it righteous (in a good way), others thought it ridiculous.
It goes beyond how brilliant the marketing strategy itself was, though make no mistake, someone at Dodge is getting a massive promotion over this. It’s the ultimate “duh” moment: who buys trucks? Farmers! What do they value? Um…let’s see…hard work, pride in how straight they plant their fields, church, passing down a farm through generations.
Who doesn’t care about any of that? Urbanized populations, big cities, corporations, people who care about gas mileage or the environment, atheists and perhaps, mostly, non-whites? Does Dodge care if they don’t care or if they don’t buy a truck? My guess is most of the people that fall into these categories weren’t driving trucks prior to viewing the ad, anyway. And if all they got out of it was Googling “Paul Harvey” to find out who he was, then really, we all came away winners.
Yet I can’t stop thinking about the reaction to the ad, the division of America and our ever-expanding cultural war.
Most commercials, especially during the Super Bowl, try a clever new way to sell you a product. And certainly, Dodge wants to sell Rams. But this, this was different. It spoke more directly to the values of middle class Americans. Think of the images they used: a church, a flag, a family praying before a meal, tractors, plows, dirty hands, open fields.
Not one single shot of the truck until the end. Not one mention of Dodge verbally, and only visually when the truck appeared. Just a tag line: “For the farmer in all of us.”
Those who chided, bristled and mocked the ad and its contents are missing the point. This wasn’t just about farmers and it wasn’t just about trucks.
There is a farmer in all of us, and probably through the generations, through our ancestors, we were all, indeed, farmers. Farming itself is an ideal and a visualization of something different: feeding people, clothing people, an honest day’s work. The open fields represent the possibility of what’s to come, of freedom, of opportunity, of doing something on your own.
Make no mistake, this message resonates with many in this country.
One part of our nation yearns for this kind of commercial, of this kind of code of ethics.
Another part of our culture posts snide remarks on social media and jokes about not knowing Paul Harvey.
One side is thankful that God was brought into our living rooms during the Super Bowl, another is offended.
And it’s this striking difference between these two groups that says the most about where we are as a society. We’ve gotten less serious. It’s why we don’t wear dresses, suits, ties and hats as we once did. We’ve desensitized ourselves to violence and sexuality. It is why we can watch the GoDaddy make out commercial without losing our lunches now.
So why is this ad about farmers and trucks, invoking so much praise and backlash at the same time? Because it serves as a rallying cry for one side of our American culture, an offensive example for the other.
The negative reaction was immediately what you would expect: too many white people, too much God. Give us more CGI-entertainment, they demanded, and don’t begrudge everyone a Carl’s Jr. commercial with some model’s chest covered in hamburger grease. Nobody seems offended when Mercedes Benz shows off its new luxury model being driven by a white 40-year-old, with meticulously coiffed hair, in Brooks Brothers clothes. The same as no one seems to mind how young and affluent blacks are targeted by Puff Daddy in Hennessy ads.
In turn, the positive reaction was also in line with generalized expectations: farmers loved it, rural populations and those from rural areas thought it was brilliant. Ignore that many migrant workers weren’t accurately represented. That’s not the point, either, really.
We’re just looking for ways to be offended so we can complain about it. And we are becoming further and further entrenched in our viewpoints. We’re so self-involved we’ve ceased to evolve.
No, we were never perfect as a nation – a far cry from it. We’ve got quite the history. But while we strive to be evolving socially, we’re losing out morally and ethically. We’ve just plain stopped striving to be anything more than novice social commentators, being snarky about power outages and Super Bowl ads. We do all this through unemotional ways of communicating and we wonder why we’re facing such a massive disconnect with each other.
We’ve come to a point where we are so singularly sure ourselves, we skip over the part of becoming informed. Newspapers and magazines and books are dying not because of technology, but because we’ve simply stopped reading. And what we do read is of vampires, werewolves and adolescent magicians.
We already think we know everything and therefore we learn nothing.
The same half of our country who thought that the “God Made a Farmer” ad was racist, stupid or just plain didn’t concern them will remain oblivious to the fact that, according to recent studies, the world’s food production must increase between 75 and 90 percent by the year 2050. Not sure if Wall Street or pharmaceutical giants can find a way to make up that gap. But we could always ask Siri on our iPhones to do a search on the Web.
Can you determine who liked the ad based on what they do or where they live, what they value and what they stand for – flaws and all? Certainly.
At least it clear who they are, what they do and what they value in the ad.
If I had been watching American news, however, from a foreign nation the past few months, I’m not sure what I would be able to determine about America based on recent events.
So they honor freedom, but they incarcerate the largest number of people per capita in the world? They claim to support freedom from tyranny, but they shoot each other in public schools, theaters and walking down the street? They demand and beg for innovation, yet teach their children to be employees, not entrepreneurs? They want people to venture out and start small businesses, but then the government will tax you exponentially for becoming successful and tell you that you didn’t build it? They say to give them the poor, the weak, the huddled masses that cannot defend themselves, but they allow abortion and pretend the homeless don’t exist?
Chances are, you got lost in some buzzwords there: abortion, incarceration, taxes, gun control. But odds are you missed what might be the biggest point of all: that we teach ourselves and our children to be good employees, not entrepreneurs.
Collectively, we’ve ceased to have vision or to dream – the very things our country was founded upon. No matter what generation, race, creed, religious affiliation, we dreamed and innovated and worked for things in this country. No one ever said I want to be project manager or a software security analyst when they were little. And that’s where we’ve started to lose everything else we did, or have, or should hold true.
We can shift in our seats, squirm uncomfortably and cringe when we hear God used in a TV ad about trucks, scoff at farmers and what they do, or what race makes up the majority of this working group. But as Jeff Daniels said in an epic speech on the show Newsroom a few months ago: “The first step to recognizing a problem is realizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”
But it can be. We can get it back. Even if farming and Dodge trucks aren’t your thing, that’s fine.
To change our future and to make what matters most to us matter again, we’ll need to make ambition, education, truth, honesty, compassion, fairness, faith, belief, hope, logic and common sense in much larger quantities.
We can make all of these things prevalent and valued again. But we have to drive our plows straight. We have to check for weeds in our fields. We have to get up early and stay up late. We have to care for our children and others as much as we do ourselves. We have to go to the school meetings, put the flag out front and build a future where the fields are wide open with possibility. Our collective tools don’t have to be plows and tractors and trucks.
So God made a farmer. And Dodge made a commercial.
Now, our culture needs to make up its mind: what do we want to be? Let’s at least get our hands a little bit dirty, work together and find out how well Americans can make a country.
Sounds better than another domain name commercial, doesn’t it?
worldbetweenlines.com 