A few things to add to the previous post:
1. I'm not going to comment on the Budweiser military advert, except to say that both Bud adverts (and quite a fair few of them actually) showed an idealised vision of the United States that doesn't really exist in reality. Young, clean, white people joyous. Instead of debating whether the military should support this advert or not, why are we not asking why that advert was even necessary? If you stop sending young folks off to war, the whole premise of the advert and the view that "we" should "support the military" becomes irrelevant. Instead,
here's an advert that didn't make it to the Superbowl (and never will). Imagine this in the place of the Budweiser advert.
2. Which brings me to
Enlisted. My granddad and us (grandkids) used to watch heaps of films borrowed from the local British Council (for those who know me in person, this partly explains the accent. As does living in a house with one main room and which had the BBC World Service on at all times). Some of our favorites were the
Dad's Army series. The construction of Britain as a plucky little island facing the scary hordes of Hitler's Germany is, of course, ridiculous for a country which still had a pretty big empire at the time the show is set. But the show itself and its ridiculous characters helped poke fun (to me, at least) at the notion that Britain was powerful. Indeed, the British were a bit stupid, keen on rules, but also innovative (some times) and lucky (at other times). I find
Enlisted similar. And by its focus on everyday aspects of war, it humanizes war. So far, in just a few episodes, they have touched on PTSD, the difficulties of being friends if you are an officer and others are your juniors? (whatever it's called in the military), and drawn attention to the difficulties faced by those left behind as folks go off to war. Of course, the gender dynamics are problematic (the show focuses on a family of three brothers. There is a female officer that commands the other team thing but, so far, she's not really had much to do) and it plays a bit too much into the whole "they're just a band of lovable misfits" narrative that seems to proliferate about just every security service in the US these days (exhibit B:
Brooklyn Nine-Nine) but I'd rather have this than something like NCIS.
I am not a regular NCIS viewer but had it on today for the episode titled "
Monsters and Men" (without any irony). There's a terrorist (brown-skinned, speaking in an English-y accent, of course), there's a young white woman (of course), there's an older white guy who "saves" this young woman and there's an interrogation scene, during which it is implied Young White Woman and Brown Terrorist Bloke had a bit of a thing going at some point. In the end, even when the disembodied voice of his sister urges him to call off his diabolical suicide bombing plan (of course, I mean, what else would brown-skinned terrorists types *do* otherwise?), BTB tries to take YWW hostage (insert your own comment regarding masculinities/fear of Brown Blokes after "our" women/etc here) and is shot by the Older White Guy. I mean, what would we do without Old White Guys to save us in the nick of damned time, eh? What?
3. Right. That apparently annoyed me more than I thought it would. Let me end with a bit of levity. Sometimes, slogging through yet another extremely boring government document on something or the other that invariably annoys me, I dream of doing a completely different kind of research. Perhaps the sort that says: "
Faster cyclists are seen as more attractive." I mean, on the one hand, yeah. On the other, what about non cyclists? Are faster humans in general considered more attractive? Should I bother with looking up the actual study (no)?
