One of the best ways to see how much we’ve changed in the past decades is to watch some of the old commercials. You can see them on TV Land, or on On Demand. Any 30 year old commercial for Lestoil (“It’s so easy when you use Lestoil), or Geritol (My wife, I think I’ll keep her), will pack more chills in 30 seconds than the entire 2 hours of The Stepford Wives.
This is why I am disturbed by two recent commercials. It is bad enough that commercials have little to do with the product they hawk – an educated consumer is definitely not the best customer. It is bad enough that seemingly responsible adult citizens describe the products they use in the privacy of their own bathrooms (and how they use them – and how they feel using them). But now we are being programmed to accept being programmed.
I began to be disturbed when Sally Field commiserated that many of her friends had to set aside time each week to take a tablet for osteoporosis. She takes once-a-month Boniva which fits in to her schedule. Now, I take a daily medication, and have never had trouble shoe-horning it into my schedule. I timed myself, and taking my Protonix pill takes about 18 seconds – unless none of the women who live in my house are around and I can drink from the faucet. If that is the case I can shave 8 seconds off my time. Sally Field evidently doesn’t have 10 seconds to spare. The message of the commercial is subtle, almost subliminal – the message that it is only natural to live life at such a break-neck pace, that one doesn’t have time to take a weekly pill. It certainly feels that way sometimes – is that way sometimes. But I refuse to accept that it is the natural way things are supposed to be – even if a flying nun with two Oscars tells me so.
The second commercial is even more disturbing because of its effective use of humor. It is a view down into a food court where a steady flow of humanity is being processed efficiently through a deli of some sort. The people move through line like a belt on a machine, they rotate around tables like spokes on a cog. The recognizable music playing is featured in several Looney Tunes cartoons (most notably the one in which Mac and Tosh take their produce to the cannery) where it is used to express the unrelenting menace of machinery. Everything is humming along smoothly because people are using their Visa Check Cards. Everything is running along smoothly until some poor sap tries to use, heaven help us, cash. At the sight of the green/gray portraits of Jefferson and Lincoln everything comes to a crashing halt, and there are dirty looks all around for the Neo-Luddite who would dare use actual government tender.
The second commercial is even more disturbing because of its effective use of humor. It is a view down into a food court where a steady flow of humanity is being processed efficiently through a deli of some sort. The people move through line like a belt on a machine, they rotate around tables like spokes on a cog. The recognizable music playing is featured in several Looney Tunes cartoons (most notably the one in which Mac and Tosh take their produce to the cannery) where it is used to express the unrelenting menace of machinery. Everything is humming along smoothly because people are using their Visa Check Cards. Everything is running along smoothly until some poor sap tries to use, heaven help us, cash. At the sight of the green/gray portraits of Jefferson and Lincoln everything comes to a crashing halt, and there are dirty looks all around for the Neo-Luddite who would dare use actual government tender.When I first saw the commercial I thought that it was trying to evoke that scene from Charlie Chaplain’s 1936 classic Modern Times, where the little tramp gets literally caught up in the cogs of machinery. Then I thought, with the way we peer down in to the depths, that if this were shot in black and white it would look a lot like a movie made ten years earlier, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The text of both movies, and the subtext of those Looney Tunes cartoons, is that making a human a cog in a machine is a very bad thing.
When I first saw the commercial I thought that it was trying to evoke that scene from Charlie Chaplain’s 1936 classic Modern Times, where the little tramp gets literally caught up in the cogs of machinery. Then I thought, with the way we peer down in to the depths, that if this were shot in black and white it would look a lot like a movie made ten years earlier, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The text of both movies, and the subtext of those Looney Tunes cartoons, is that making a human a cog in a machine is a very bad thing.The message of the commercial is that making a human being a cog in a machine is a very good thing.
Smitty Covey used one of his last Shepherd’s Sunday Night sermons here to remind us that the Church is an organism, not an organization. It was a sermon I will never stop quoting. The Bible says we are branches on a vine (John 15), sheep in a fold (John 10), organs in a body (I Corinthians 12, Romans 12), but never spokes on a cog. The images the Bible uses to describe us admit that we are dependent and connected – but that we are alive, individual, unique. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jesus’ description of the Shepherd and his own sheep in John 10. They know his individual voice (v. 4) and he calls each one out, individually, by its own, personal name (v.3).
So much is at stake if we are successfully taught to see people and not persons, the crowd, not the individual. The souls of others will cease to be important to us if all we see is a crowd. Soon our own souls will have little value as well. I refuse to go gladly, or to go at all, into the machine – no matter how smoothly it runs. God has called me to be a branch on his vine, a sheep in his pasture, a member of his body - not a spoke on a cog.
