Published by: Dan Calabrese on Monday February 3rd, 2014
Bob Dylan Superbowl Commercial a Disgrace
And the praise it’s receiving is a lot of affected, parochial nonsense. It sucks just like Chrysler and the UAW.
As soon as I saw Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad starring Bob Dylan last night, I was pretty sure two things would happen: 1. Boosters of the domestic auto industry would lavish it with exaggerated, emotionalistic praise; 2. I would want to vomit.
Fortunately, I controlled my bodily functions and avoided that second one. There was no avoiding the first.
Once again, Chrysler avoided the issue of its mediocre quality and its history of embarrassing failure and feted us with a shameless appeal to “economic nationalism” as Richard Gephardt used to put it. Buy American, we were implored by the company that just a couple weeks ago became 100 percent owned by an Italian company that is restructuring so it can place its headquarters in the Netherlands as an EU tax dodge.
Red, white and blue, baby!
Here is the total, unadulterated load of crap Chrysler put on the air last night:
Most of what Dylan says doesn’t even make any sense. “Is there anything more American than America?”
Guess not, Bob.
“You can’t import original”?
“You can’t fake true cool”?
“You can’t duplicate legacy”?
What does any of that even mean? It’s as big a meaningless serving of nonsense as what then-Chairman Robert Nardelli said when he went to beg Congress for Chrysler’s second taxpayer bailout.
“You can’t import the heart and soul of every man and woman working on the line”?
You can’t important the bloated union wage and benefit scale dicated by the UAW, either. I don’t think you would want to try.
“We believe in the zoom and the road and the thrust, and when it’s made here, it’s made with the one thing you can’t import from anywhere else. American pride.”
Apparently American pride isn’t important for watches and phones, but is crucial for cars.
This is getting to be a habit with Chrysler. All three of the Detroit-based automakers have had chips on their shoulders for years about the rising market share being captured by transplants like Toyota, Nissan, Kia and, um, Fiat. But Chrysler, which has the lowest market share among the Detroit Three and the least to recommend it in terms of product selection or quality, is the most shameless about attempting to guilt-trip consumers into buying American-made products just because they are American-made.
But only when it comes to cars, you understand.
Buy any watch or phone you want because “American pride” only counts when it’s necessary to benefit desperate car companies. (Yes, I know Chrysler is currently on the upside of the domestic auto industry’s never-ending boom/bust cycle. They’ve been on that upside before.)
In case I need to remind you, this is a company that has received not one but two federal bailouts in the past 35 years. It is also a company that abandoned its headquarter city of Highland Park, Michigan, leaving it in utter ruin. I don’t mean to suggest that is all Chrysler’s fault. A company can move its headquarters if it wants. But when the Detroit automakers shamelessly try to appeal to consumers on the basis of how important they’ve been to the nation and to their communities, it’s fair to note that one of them completely decimated the community it had called home for decades.
The bottom line is that Chrysler has a history of making mediocre cars that not that many consumers want to buy, languishing at the bottom of the market, experiencing constant ownership churn (going from independent and publicly traded to German-owned to owned by an investment group and then sold to the Italians), while needing to be rescued by U.S. taxpayers roughly once every generation. But at least its workers have “American pride,” if that’s what you call going off at their lunch hours to get drunk and stoned, which does not get them fired thanks to the UAW.
Maybe the question Dylan should have asked at the start of the ad is, “Is there anything more American than Chrysler?” Why yes. Companies that produce good products and consistently make a profit, not needing taxpayer bailouts and not needing to guilt-trip consumers, are more American than Chrysler.
The “Buy American” crap from the Detroit Three and the UAW is an old and tired refrain. Buy what you want. And for most of you, that’s not a Chrysler car.
Dan’s series of Christian spiritual thrillers – Powers and Principalities, Pharmakeia and Dark Matter – make great reading if you like Christian fiction, or you’d like to give it a try for the first time! You can buy the whole series, or get them one at a time, here in either print or e-book form. Follow all of Dan’s work by liking his page on Facebook.
