Comrade Chad

Chad in da' house! While Nelson is busy doing the man's bidding, I decided to take time from grading papers from my professor's social ecology class, and throw some knowledge at you. Who knows, maybe a little truth can seep into your cool-aid-logged brains?

Anyways:

I turned on some sporting event to gather notes on my next column in the series, Why Americans are Stupid Racists and Have a Lot to Learn From Venezuela. I gathered lots of material: the warlike chants, sheep-like adherence to civic and national pride, ignorance of American imperialism, commercialism, distraction from the plight of the uninsured. Interrupting this American carnival of depravity are consumerist propaganda called, innocently enough, "commercials" that tell people they smell bad, have rough skin from shaving, and need to buy products that drain our Mother of Her resources.

Most of them are only mildly fascist. One of them is quite shocking, however, even for someone as aware as myself of American depravity.

Observe:

The ad, for some corporation called "Heineken" (I only drink beers from unaligned nations) appears to be saying that women get excited over clothes while men have a similar reaction towards beer, a completely sexist notion. Bush! My male friends love nothing more than to spend an afternoon looking through Details and GQ and planning the season's wardrobe, while a lot of women I know throw down beers at the same clip that Dick Cheney killed innocent Iraqi babies (and good for them! women are finally showing that they can be as bold as any sex).

Then I noticed that the original commercial (above) was in German or something, "Hey, Europeans are enlightened. How can they stoop to American-style ignorance?" I thought.

Well, they don't. You see, the commercial is lampooning the idea that men and women would use house-space any differently, and Americans take it seriously. Ha! The jokes on you, homophobes! Witness this response:

You see, the men, in asserting sex differences, isolate themselves from mainstream society and lose out on what society has deemed "desirable females," just as Darwin points out.

It also suggests that men who have long hair and are cool are not homosexuals, unlike those who practice gender conformity.

Oh, and yes, I realize that nobody should have a large enough carbon footprint as to necessitate such a huge closet (I've converted my mom's walk-in closet into a classroom to teach local youth about the crimes commited in their name), but I'm not a fanatic.