I watched part of the Repo Men’s convention tonight on my TV, while my computer was playing the first-season DVDs of Mad Men. As you may know, that’s the HBO-esque drama (actually on AMC) about an ad agency in 1960 that’s so behind the times, it still devises whole major national product campaigns around two-page ads in The Saturday Evening Post.
Like that agency and the Mad(ison Avenue) Men running it, the Republican Party’s retail marketing effort has, for a generation, been about a lifestyle brand image that presumes a target market that’s so different from me, relentlessly pushing emotional buttons I haven’t got.
Note the convention slogan, “Country First.”
In the first half of the last century, “America First” was a slogan of guys like William Randolph Hearst who advocated keeping our butts out of other countries’ business when it didn’t directly affect us. In practical terms, the America Firsters helped delay U.S. involvement in both world wars.
Today’s “Country First” means the opposite. It means war everywhere, war forever, just as long as somebody else’s kids have to fight ’em.
But “Country” could also be construed as implying the rural/exurban, lily-white, never-existed fantasy utopia to which the GOPpers, from Nixon on down, have appealed. A place that’s no more real than the world within a ’50s magazine ad.
Meanwhile, several blogospherians have noted that the most outlandish (and probably false) rumor about Sarah Palin (that she’d faked a pregnancy to hide that of her own teenage daughter) resembled a storyline in the past season of Desperate Housewives. As you may know, that’s the ABC drama set in a refined residential suburb where fantasies of The Good Life violently clash with brutal reality on a regular basis.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which Republican Convention celebrities are more like which Desperate Housewives characters. (To me, Cindy McCain looks like a Bree but acts more like a Gabriele.)
Other thots: Fred Thompson’s speech was all banal as heck, but at least he delivered it professionally. (Though the only Lawn Order star I like is S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I’ll always remember as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.)
Same could not be said for George W. Bush’s satellite speech. NBC’s prime-time convention hour included an excerpt from Bush’s speech in D.C., without the applause audio from the convention in St. Paul. It just made this failed-head-of-state seem even clumsier.
