But there’s a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge’s world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that’s about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.
Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge’s ad. Here’s what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.
Analyzing the hidden messages communicated by the demographics of commercials is fun stuff. I’ll admit that. Madrigal continues, making an argument similar to one Yglesias threw out on Twitter:
I couldn’t help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.
It’s true that whites are the managers of 96 percent of the nation’s farms, according to the USDA’s 2007 Census of Agriculture. But the agricultural workforce is overwhelmingly Mexican with some workers from Central America thrown in. The Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Worker Survey has found that over the last decade, around 70 percent of farmworkers in America were born in Mexico, most in a few states along the Pacific coast. This should not be news. Everyone knows this is how farms are run.
And yet when a company decided to pay homage to the people who grow our food, they left out the people who do much of the labor, particularly on the big farms that continue to power the food system. You want to tell a grand story about the glories of working the land? You want to celebrate the people who grow food? You want to expound on the positive ‘merican qualities that agricultural work develops in people? Great! What a nice, nostalgic idea!
Now, did God make Mexican farmworkers or only white farmers? Is the strength and toughness that comes from hard work God’s gift to white people only?
Madrigal does acknowledge the importance of target demographics and so this should be no mystery. The most important demographic here are the farmers who will actually buy brand new trucks. An extension is the people who would feel a bit of nostalgia for farming as a romanticized American institution. So we’re talking about “managers” and owners of farms, and the people who have nostalgia for an era of widespread farm ownership. This isn’t a nostalgia for “the people who grow our food”; it’s nostalgia for the people for whom farming is their identity.
This nostalgia is less likely to have an impact on migrant workers – people who are, by definition, transitory and therefore not as likely to have deep ties to the land. The ad is nostalgic about the way that American agrarianism fits into our sense of patriotism as well as our very American ideal of land ownership.
So one could make the case that this is classist rather than racist. Capital versus labor, and then someone will inevitably say something about how the white man stole the land from Natives or Mexicans. That discussion would actually be much more interesting than the one about simple racial patterns featured in a glossy commercial airing in 2013.
But might as well go deeper.
When we investigate what makes someone a farmer we are asking a question about identity. How their being is tied to their occupation – or, rather, their vocation. I’d argue that a migrant worker or someone who works in the fields and does the laborious work of moving our foodstuff from point A to point B is not necessarily a farmer in this exact sense. So the romanticization of the farmer won’t be as inclusive of this type of worker. The campesino may be farming, but he is not actually “a farmer”. That is not his identity or his vocation; that is his occupation. Copywriters aren’t necessarily writer writers. They are writing, but they could just as easily get picked up as an office worker or a salesman and not have their identity affected by the occupational shift. So the essence of a farmer farmer requires a deeper root. And that root is fittingly buried in the soil, earth, dirt, land, etc.
Some of my family on my mom’s side were Okie farmers. My great-grandparents owned a plot of land on which five children including my grandmother were raised. It was where my great-grandmother sold eggs and milk and where cotton was grown. She loved that land so much that, according to family legend, she died of a broken heart when half of The Farm was sold to the government for interstate highway construction.
When Harvey spoke of a farmer shedding a tear for a lost colt or contributing to the local community, he spoke of something that runs deeper than the mere investment of time and even energy. Identity is at stake. Dodge is trying to sell that integrity; those who care only about a job can buy Chevy or Ford.
All of this is in theory, and we have to keep in mind that Dodge (and Paul Harvey) wanted to paint a more Rockwellian picture than what actually exists in rural America today or even in 1978. Corporations have caused (forced?) farmers to leave their land, to seek other types of jobs, and to move to more densely populated locales. Many of former farmer stock (such as my family) didn’t maintain the livelihood though there is still that desire to have it all back.
The most incisive type of critique of the Dodge ad isn’t that it displays some sort of whitewashing; it’s that it is carrying on this romanticized notion of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal even while the few farmers that still exist in this country don’t wake up every morning to sniff the dirt or even get their hands dirty. But the point of any ingenious ad is to make us all feel as if we’re part of a bigger group than actually exists. Dodge acknowledges this with its script at the end: “to the farmer in all of us.”
TL;DR version of this: the Dodge ad is selling nostalgia, and nostalgia in America tends to work best on white people when it depicts the working white class engaging in their ways of life. And doubly so when the salt of the earth type is engaged in a vocation through which they draw their sense of identity and purpose. Steelworkers and such. It’s hard to imply racism or whitewashing though if the same tone of ad were geared towards Hispanics who aren’t as susceptible to this type of advert ploy. A question for another time: why are American whites so prone to nostalgia? Keep in mind, some consider nostalgia a type of mental illness, and others consider white nostalgia to be racist, though others acknowledge white nostalgia without blaming racism.
Further reading: psychologist Erik Erikson on occupational identity.
Two things I noticed about the article and the comments:
1) the media really loves to comment on itself.
2) A lot of people talk about the lack of accuracy in the commercial wrt to minorities especial latinos, but people tend to remain silent when other inaccuracies are shown in the media, e.g. the abundance of women programmers, black doctors, etc. on TV.*
There’s something about people who really care a lot about media representation. It strikes me as mostly status signalling. It’s easier to write a comment about the lack of X representation in the media than actually doing something about it in real life.
In addition to Mexican migrants, I think the commercial should have shown obese Americans. I do know farmers like the ones shown in this commercial. Those people do exist, although they are a dying breed.
Underlying all this is the reality that left to their own devices, there would be no campesino farms at all. Just as in Rhodesia when the white farmers were thrown off their land and/or killed, the farms quickly fell into decay, the same would happen in the U.S. if the campesinos were the farmers, rather than just the modern-day cotton pickers that they are.
When the Future Farmers of America convention is in Indianapolis, it is a white out in downtown Indy. This is purely nostalgic on Dodge’s part, and very smart marketing. It’s not like food ads show the highly mechanized slaughterhouses of today compared to what Americans envision for animal slaughtering, which is from the ’50s.
Where’s the ad critique for all of the ads that show black kids with a father in a 3000 square foot house? Yeah, didn’t think they’d touch that one.
“…but people tend to remain silent when other inaccuracies are shown in the media, e.g. the abundance of women programmers, black doctors, etc. on TV.”
No kidding. How about the plethora of ads featuring very attractive Hispanic women, when the reality is that (at least here in southern California) the typical Hispanic female is short, pudgy-to-obese, and to put it charitably has a face only a mother could love.
I’ll bet some interesting conversations go on in the offices of ad agencies. Companies want to appeal to Hispanic consumers, but there’s probably research that’s already been done (and isn’t talked about) that shows that as soon as a product starts to be perceived by the public as “Hispanic” its appeal to middle class consumers is shot. The same thing happened with malt liquor about 35-40 years ago. Colt 45 was marketed to white, middle class beer drinkers until the mid-1970s. But something changed, and now malt liquor is considered almost an exclusively “black” and therefore downscale beverage.
The ad isn’t selling Dodge trucks to farmers, it’s selling them to Americans, using nostalgia for the farm. People don’t have nostalgia for 20,000-acre corporate farms in California’s Central Valley, they have nostalgia for the 160-acre to 640-acre family farms in Ohio and Iowa and Mississippi. Lots of Americans are only one or two generations away from that life, and many have a relative who stayed behind on that farm. (My wife grew up on one; her father still works it, mostly by himself.)
That’s what Dodge is showing. And those farms are mostly owned and worked by white people, with some owned and run by black people, especially in the South.
The ad also tapped into a current sentiment: the SWPL locavore movement. Judging from my Facebook feed, swpls loved the ad because it was about real non-corporate, presumably organic, farmers.
From a marketing perspective, that ad was genius. It’s a Rorschach test.
The commercial is powerful (however inaccurate or anachronistic) to white people because it taps into ancient longings for a land to call one’s own. The faster that land disappears from white stewardship, the greater the longing. There’s a fear and loathing of farmers running through the commentary on them by the cosmopolitan elite, and this evocation of white homeland is one of the primary drivers of that fear. The other is… well, when the SHTF, it’s the farmers who will be able to call the shots.
The dude from GMP on Twitter who’s getting the vapors at GLPiggy’s suggestion of a crime/HBD link lives in a 2% A-A town in New England. #shocker #GoodSchoooolz
Farmers are among the biggest supporters and greatest benefactors of the overclass. They get subsidies in return for supporting liberalism, so some of the biggest and most influential liberals are from farm states.
Fiddlesticks 02/05/2013 at 11:18 am
The dude from GMP on Twitter who’s getting the vapors at GLPiggy’s suggestion of a crime/HBD link lives in a 2% A-A town in New England. #shocker #GoodSchoooolz
———————-
Farmers are among the biggest supporters and greatest benefactors of the overclass.
Those people aren’t farmers. Most farms in America are owned by one of a handful of corporations. The people receiving these subsidies aren’t farmers, and they aren’t even farm managers.
“Those people aren’t farmers. Most farms in America are owned by one of a handful of corporations. The people receiving these subsidies aren’t farmers, and they aren’t even farm managers.”
There’s a lot of family farms still out there and from what I’ve read on a couple of farmer sites this week they really liked that ad, although I agree with those above that say it wasn’t an ad for farmers.
“The ad also tapped into a current sentiment: the SWPL locavore movement. Judging from my Facebook feed, swpls loved the ad because it was about real non-corporate, presumably organic, farmers.”
I have just been reading some Andrew Lytle, of the Southern Agrarians from the 1930s. While they were, of course, pilloried as racist barbarians by the cosmopolitan elite, the irony is that the Agrarian’s sentiments were identical to the current locavore movement, and they fully predicted the horrors to come from corporate farming. As Madison Smart Bell notes in his introduction, “By the radical disconnection of the sources of food from the people who consume it, the foundation of any sort of moral responsibility is broken.”
Strangely, as twisted as they can be, there is a kernel of deep truth and value in the SWPL mentality. If only they could be broken from their radical Leftist indoctrination. Their yearnings are good ones.
There are just endless ironies to it all, not the least of which is that the true motive of the Civil War — the Northern merchant class’ burning desire to destroy the native American aristocracy of the South, which they viscerally detested out of their radical Puritan leveling — created a new aristocracy of finance and centralized political power, rather than ownership and stewardship of the land combined with local control.
In other words, if you’re an OWS protestor, you should walk around with pictures of Lincoln with a Hitler mustache.
I live in Central Idaho and that commercial depicts perfectly what life is like on the ranches around here as well as on the big farms in the country south of here on the Snake River plain. These disgustingly smug, self-righteous and truly ignorant “City People” who’ve never grown a damn thing but a couple of tomatoes and never had a calf, colt, a chick die in their arms or their hands after working with it all night long can go straight to hell if they’re not already there.
In some places the “America” in that commercial still exists and the rest of the population in this deracinated political entity (a nation no longer) would just as soon wish it didn’t. Well, to hell with them. We’re not leaving, or at least not without one hell of a fight.
The thing about it is, for some parts of the country, it’s not even nostalgia for a time that long ago. Growing up around corn and soybean farmers, I never saw a single migrant worker. They just weren’t necessary. Most of it was harvested by a combine, and what little needed to be done by hand (like detasselling corn) was done eagerly by high school students. As recently as the late nineties, it was like that around here.
As far as why American whites are so nostalgic, a lot of it is just because a great many of them really are worse off than their parents, in a lot of ways.
But Americans have always been considered nostalgic. I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that, historically speaking, America has just been more dynamic than most other countries around the world. And while progress is certainly a good thing, it does end up destroying a lot of things people liked, and those things tend not to come back. People who still live in crappy semi-rural towns can look around and see how much it sucks now, but it used to be a pretty decent way of life, that was a better fit for a lot of people than city life. People in cities who remember the “old neighborhood” type of white ethnic enclaves before they were destroyed by NAMs know that they’re never going to come back. A lot of people really would have been better off before feminism, but that’s not going away anytime soon.
Nostalgia would be an unhealthy response if there was anything you could do to get these things back. But how are you going to revive small-town life? Even Charles Murray doesn’t really have an answer. How are you going to restore all-Polish neighborhoods or whatever?
2) A lot of people talk about the lack of accuracy in the commercial wrt to minorities especial latinos, but people tend to remain silent when other inaccuracies are shown in the media, e.g. the abundance of women programmers, black doctors, etc. on TV.*
I was going to bring up the Black Doctor Icon. In tv, movies, ads etc the black male doctor is an iconic symbol of American medicine.
Where are the Asian/East Indian doctors in the media?
Do you think these White liberals are bothered by that?
But it’s the kind of cultural substrate in which our laws and prejudices grow.
You’ve got to be kidding me. How about talking about a real case of whitewashing – the portrayal of murders in American cities as exclusively white when they are in fact 90-98% black and brown? How might our immigration policies be affected if a true portrait of Hispanic and other immigrant crime, or a true portrait of their welfare use, was shown on television instead of being “brownwashed” by the white-hating liberal racists who control that media? The racist, dishonest way the anti-white left buries non-white crime on television directly contributes to sustaining that crime. Unlike the Dodge commercials Liberal racial dishonesty kills and rapes and maims. What we have here is a murderer complaining about a hub-cap thief.
Two things I noticed about the article and the comments:
1) the media really loves to comment on itself.
2) A lot of people talk about the lack of accuracy in the commercial wrt to minorities especial latinos, but people tend to remain silent when other inaccuracies are shown in the media, e.g. the abundance of women programmers, black doctors, etc. on TV.*
There’s something about people who really care a lot about media representation. It strikes me as mostly status signalling. It’s easier to write a comment about the lack of X representation in the media than actually doing something about it in real life.
In addition to Mexican migrants, I think the commercial should have shown obese Americans. I do know farmers like the ones shown in this commercial. Those people do exist, although they are a dying breed.
Translation: why aren’t you eradicated yet, Kulaks?
Underlying all this is the reality that left to their own devices, there would be no campesino farms at all. Just as in Rhodesia when the white farmers were thrown off their land and/or killed, the farms quickly fell into decay, the same would happen in the U.S. if the campesinos were the farmers, rather than just the modern-day cotton pickers that they are.
“why are American whites so prone to nostalgia?”
Because they know their best days are behind them.
When the Future Farmers of America convention is in Indianapolis, it is a white out in downtown Indy. This is purely nostalgic on Dodge’s part, and very smart marketing. It’s not like food ads show the highly mechanized slaughterhouses of today compared to what Americans envision for animal slaughtering, which is from the ’50s.
Where’s the ad critique for all of the ads that show black kids with a father in a 3000 square foot house? Yeah, didn’t think they’d touch that one.
“…but people tend to remain silent when other inaccuracies are shown in the media, e.g. the abundance of women programmers, black doctors, etc. on TV.”
No kidding. How about the plethora of ads featuring very attractive Hispanic women, when the reality is that (at least here in southern California) the typical Hispanic female is short, pudgy-to-obese, and to put it charitably has a face only a mother could love.
I’ll bet some interesting conversations go on in the offices of ad agencies. Companies want to appeal to Hispanic consumers, but there’s probably research that’s already been done (and isn’t talked about) that shows that as soon as a product starts to be perceived by the public as “Hispanic” its appeal to middle class consumers is shot. The same thing happened with malt liquor about 35-40 years ago. Colt 45 was marketed to white, middle class beer drinkers until the mid-1970s. But something changed, and now malt liquor is considered almost an exclusively “black” and therefore downscale beverage.
The ad isn’t selling Dodge trucks to farmers, it’s selling them to Americans, using nostalgia for the farm. People don’t have nostalgia for 20,000-acre corporate farms in California’s Central Valley, they have nostalgia for the 160-acre to 640-acre family farms in Ohio and Iowa and Mississippi. Lots of Americans are only one or two generations away from that life, and many have a relative who stayed behind on that farm. (My wife grew up on one; her father still works it, mostly by himself.)
That’s what Dodge is showing. And those farms are mostly owned and worked by white people, with some owned and run by black people, especially in the South.
The ad also tapped into a current sentiment: the SWPL locavore movement. Judging from my Facebook feed, swpls loved the ad because it was about real non-corporate, presumably organic, farmers.
From a marketing perspective, that ad was genius. It’s a Rorschach test.
The commercial is powerful (however inaccurate or anachronistic) to white people because it taps into ancient longings for a land to call one’s own. The faster that land disappears from white stewardship, the greater the longing. There’s a fear and loathing of farmers running through the commentary on them by the cosmopolitan elite, and this evocation of white homeland is one of the primary drivers of that fear. The other is… well, when the SHTF, it’s the farmers who will be able to call the shots.
The dude from GMP on Twitter who’s getting the vapors at GLPiggy’s suggestion of a crime/HBD link lives in a 2% A-A town in New England. #shocker #GoodSchoooolz
Farmers are among the biggest supporters and greatest benefactors of the overclass. They get subsidies in return for supporting liberalism, so some of the biggest and most influential liberals are from farm states.
Fiddlesticks 02/05/2013 at 11:18 am
The dude from GMP on Twitter who’s getting the vapors at GLPiggy’s suggestion of a crime/HBD link lives in a 2% A-A town in New England. #shocker #GoodSchoooolz
———————-
Send him to Detroit!
Those people aren’t farmers. Most farms in America are owned by one of a handful of corporations. The people receiving these subsidies aren’t farmers, and they aren’t even farm managers.
“Those people aren’t farmers. Most farms in America are owned by one of a handful of corporations. The people receiving these subsidies aren’t farmers, and they aren’t even farm managers.”
Cargill.
There’s a lot of family farms still out there and from what I’ve read on a couple of farmer sites this week they really liked that ad, although I agree with those above that say it wasn’t an ad for farmers.
Here’s an example thread: http://www.cattletoday.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=81951
“The ad also tapped into a current sentiment: the SWPL locavore movement. Judging from my Facebook feed, swpls loved the ad because it was about real non-corporate, presumably organic, farmers.”
I have just been reading some Andrew Lytle, of the Southern Agrarians from the 1930s. While they were, of course, pilloried as racist barbarians by the cosmopolitan elite, the irony is that the Agrarian’s sentiments were identical to the current locavore movement, and they fully predicted the horrors to come from corporate farming. As Madison Smart Bell notes in his introduction, “By the radical disconnection of the sources of food from the people who consume it, the foundation of any sort of moral responsibility is broken.”
Strangely, as twisted as they can be, there is a kernel of deep truth and value in the SWPL mentality. If only they could be broken from their radical Leftist indoctrination. Their yearnings are good ones.
There are just endless ironies to it all, not the least of which is that the true motive of the Civil War — the Northern merchant class’ burning desire to destroy the native American aristocracy of the South, which they viscerally detested out of their radical Puritan leveling — created a new aristocracy of finance and centralized political power, rather than ownership and stewardship of the land combined with local control.
In other words, if you’re an OWS protestor, you should walk around with pictures of Lincoln with a Hitler mustache.
I live in Central Idaho and that commercial depicts perfectly what life is like on the ranches around here as well as on the big farms in the country south of here on the Snake River plain. These disgustingly smug, self-righteous and truly ignorant “City People” who’ve never grown a damn thing but a couple of tomatoes and never had a calf, colt, a chick die in their arms or their hands after working with it all night long can go straight to hell if they’re not already there.
In some places the “America” in that commercial still exists and the rest of the population in this deracinated political entity (a nation no longer) would just as soon wish it didn’t. Well, to hell with them. We’re not leaving, or at least not without one hell of a fight.
The thing about it is, for some parts of the country, it’s not even nostalgia for a time that long ago. Growing up around corn and soybean farmers, I never saw a single migrant worker. They just weren’t necessary. Most of it was harvested by a combine, and what little needed to be done by hand (like detasselling corn) was done eagerly by high school students. As recently as the late nineties, it was like that around here.
As far as why American whites are so nostalgic, a lot of it is just because a great many of them really are worse off than their parents, in a lot of ways.
But Americans have always been considered nostalgic. I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that, historically speaking, America has just been more dynamic than most other countries around the world. And while progress is certainly a good thing, it does end up destroying a lot of things people liked, and those things tend not to come back. People who still live in crappy semi-rural towns can look around and see how much it sucks now, but it used to be a pretty decent way of life, that was a better fit for a lot of people than city life. People in cities who remember the “old neighborhood” type of white ethnic enclaves before they were destroyed by NAMs know that they’re never going to come back. A lot of people really would have been better off before feminism, but that’s not going away anytime soon.
Nostalgia would be an unhealthy response if there was anything you could do to get these things back. But how are you going to revive small-town life? Even Charles Murray doesn’t really have an answer. How are you going to restore all-Polish neighborhoods or whatever?
peterike – I concur. I loathe the fascist tendencies, but swpls do have good taste. I’m a farmer’s market shopping, grass finished beef eating man.
Have you ever read Joel Salatin? Your comment reminded me of this piece he wrote.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cultivating-freedom/
2) A lot of people talk about the lack of accuracy in the commercial wrt to minorities especial latinos, but people tend to remain silent when other inaccuracies are shown in the media, e.g. the abundance of women programmers, black doctors, etc. on TV.*
I was going to bring up the Black Doctor Icon. In tv, movies, ads etc the black male doctor is an iconic symbol of American medicine.
Where are the Asian/East Indian doctors in the media?
Do you think these White liberals are bothered by that?
But it’s the kind of cultural substrate in which our laws and prejudices grow.
You’ve got to be kidding me. How about talking about a real case of whitewashing – the portrayal of murders in American cities as exclusively white when they are in fact 90-98% black and brown? How might our immigration policies be affected if a true portrait of Hispanic and other immigrant crime, or a true portrait of their welfare use, was shown on television instead of being “brownwashed” by the white-hating liberal racists who control that media? The racist, dishonest way the anti-white left buries non-white crime on television directly contributes to sustaining that crime. Unlike the Dodge commercials Liberal racial dishonesty kills and rapes and maims. What we have here is a murderer complaining about a hub-cap thief.
When I saw that ad I figured the libs were gonna lose their shit over it, and they didnt disappoint.