Posted by
Defend America on Saturday, February 13, 2010 9:27:12 AM
February 13, 2010 7:00 A.M.
The New Conformo-radicalism
Groupthink compliance has never felt so right!
A man asks for a plastic bag
at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head’s slammed
against the counter, and he’s being cuffed by the Green Police. “You
picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem
,
plastic boy,” sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to
more Green Police going through your trash, until they find . . . a
battery! “Take the house!” orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a
roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the
lines of vehicles to check they’re in environmental compliance.
If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted,
up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a
libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian
tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some
splendidly contrarian type — perhaps Clint lui-même in his
famous Gran Torino — will come roaring through flipping the bird at the
stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead
the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. “You’re good to go,” they
tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he
meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: “Green
has never felt so right.”So the message from Audi isn’t “You are a free man.
Don’t bend to the statist bullies,” but “Resistance is futile. You
might as well get with the program.”
Strange. Not so long ago,
car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons:
Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for
adventure. . . . To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in
suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin
bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert
plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular
promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half
the planet. Freedom!
http://article.nationalreview.com/424914/the-new-conformo-radicalism/mark-steyn?page=1