Guns and Muffins

John Oliver takes on NRATV. Stick with it to the end. I’ve never laughed so hard over breakfast:

Omg, I’ll never look at a blueberry muffin the same way again.

The ad agency who proclaims “Every brand must be its own media company” is correct. It’s not the fault of the media though. The problem is with the brand itself and what it stands for.

Usually, it’s money and power. That’s why we capitalists sell things in the first place- to make money. But to sell you something, sometimes it’s necessary to create a need. So the NRA brand creates a need- to protect yourself from the zombie elite and terrorist apocalypse- and sells you solution- a big f*^%ing gun.

What other brands do advertisement like this to sell their product?

Let me see, well, Jehovah’s Witnesses do this. Here’s the pitch: you’re going to DIE!! Death, death, DEATH!!! You weren’t meant to die but Eve f%^*ed everything up and mankind fell out of favor and got tossed out of the garden of eden and missed out on eternal life. Do you want to live forever? Well, DO YOU? Because Armageddon is coming and Jesus is pissed and you don’t want to be on his bad side. There’s the need: Getting on Jesus’s good list and living forever. And what is the product? A lifetime of indoctrination of fear to keep you terrified of dying so that you will go door to door selling books and other publications, for free!, for the watchtower bible and tract society. It’s like signing a contract for a gym membership that you’ll never use but will cost you money and you’ll never be able to get out of it. Did I mention the Watchtower Bible and Tract society gets you to sell its product for free?

Fox News does this. Have you ever been forced to watch Fox in a doctor’s office? It’s all about sexual predators of children, missing white women, assault on family values, American carnage. That’s the pitch creating the need- someone to beat the snot out of soft squishy liberals who put us all in danger of socialist gay fiancés demanding wedding cakes, working at forced abortion mills and ramming sharia law down our throats just before they kidnap and rape your granddaughters, and behead your blonde hot neighbor who got a little wild and probably deserved it. And what do they promote as their product that will save us all from this fate of irrational, does not parse, chaotic existence? Every Republican running in your state. Yep, just put yourself in the hands of these manly macho men who will protect you from wedding cake dictators.

Do you see a theme here? Let me spell it out: any entity that scares the crap out of you to sell you a product should probably be avoided.

It’s a backlash to this kind of thing we grew up with:

Damn hippy libs forcing harmony, diversity, sunshine and empty calories down our throats.

They might have a point except you can always limit your intake, ask your Chinese colleagues for healthier recipes with more veg, get out into the fresh air to exercise, and lose the extra weight. It’s much harder to get your government back and fix a broken and broke, bullet riddled country with a bad reputation in the world for being run by an out of control mob of deliberately ignorant aggressive loser assholes.