We're better people than 'Game On, Santa' would have us believe

[Ubiquitous]

By Hank Stuever

I bring glad and mad tidings about the Christmastime TV offerings. The
commercials have gone too far this year, with many of them depicting a
consumer culture that is grabby, hasty, heartless and smug.

Is that the only way left to entice the beleaguered American consumer to
shop? By depicting us as jerks?

Best Buy, in particular, is running a terribly callous series of
commercials called "Game On, Santa," in which obsessed female shoppers
purchase the gifts their loved ones really want at Best Buy and then wait
up on Christmas Eve to accost Santa Claus in their living rooms and gloat
that they've already beat him to the punch.

In your face, you outdated fat man with your outdated presents!

"Awk-ward," a woman mock-hisses at a baffled, sweet Santa caught standing
at her tree, ready to lay out his gifts to her family.

She points out that she has already filled her children's stockings with
Best Buy junk, offering him a chance to fill her dog's stocking instead.
No one can watch this ad and feel at all good about its message, or about
a society that would become so fixated on transactions that it viciously
turns on Santa.

BOOM! In bad taste

In another Best Buy ad, a woman triumphantly and loudly gulps down the
glass of milk left for Santa by her children, while Santa watches with a
confused and intimidated look on his face. In still another, as Santa
prepares to leave a bottle of cologne by the tree, he is confronted by
the lady of the house, who boasts that "Daddy don't want no cologne" and
gestures toward the flat-screen TV she bought her hubby at Best Buy.

Months ago, there must have been a roomful of Best Buy muckety-mucks who
were presented with this atonal, needlessly mean-spirited ad campaign and
were utterly delighted by the notion, laughing their heads off.

I wonder if anyone in charge had second thoughts.

Why would they? Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target have encouraged the
prolonging of Black Friday mania, further emphasizing the holiday's sense
of panic and deadline and savings one-upmanship.

In a Wal-Mart ad, a customer (again depicted as a manners-challenged,
busy bee mom) asks a Wal-Mart electronics department clerk if he will
take a look at her to-do list. "It's all crossed out," he observes.

"That's 'cause I got everything on it - BOOM!" she taunts loudly, in the
employee's face, using gestures usually reserved for the basketball
court.

The point of Christmas?

For its part, Target has added a commercial in which a variety of
Christmas strivers all shout "DONE!" to themselves or to others, with a
self-satisfied tone: baking, DONE! Decorating, DONE! Cards, DONE!
Shopping, DONE! Wrapping, DONE! One woman dances a victory jig, punching
the air.

That's the point of Christmas? To get it over with? Certainly we can all
relate to the satisfaction of completing the errands and chores, to find
that ever-shrinking nanosecond of peace and joy ("all is calm, all is
bright," etc.) that the season promises.

What these ads have either sensed or stumbled into, however, is our
increasing need to turn everything into a heated competition. Life now
plays out like bitter sports rivalries - us vs. them, or really, me
against everyone else in the Best Buy.

On the eve of what promises to be an ugly (and costly) 2012 election
cycle, amid an atmosphere of growing worry about wealth and resources,
with palpable acrimony simmering between the haves and the have-nots (the
haves are still seen on TV giving one another Lexuses with big red bows
atop), watching the ads that lard up the airwaves this Christmas has
become a depressing activity.


--
"If Barack Obama isn't careful, he will become the Jimmy Carter of the
21st century."