Lorne Gunter: Here come the Green Shirts
Eric Gisin
February 10, 2010, 06:15:00 | Chris Selley
Far and away the cleverest ad from this year's Super Bowl was Audi's "Green Police" commercial for
its A3 TDI clean diesel sedan, which is greencar.com's2010 Green Car of the Year. It's easy to find
on YouTube and well worth the search. The 60-second spot is a brilliant send up of the excesses of
the environmental movement, so brilliant that green and lefty blogs have been angrily denouncing
the ad ever since it aired on Sunday during the NFL Championship game.
Too bad nobody told the carmaker it's OK to laugh at its own production. The company's timid
explanation is that Green Police are "caricatures" designed to gently steer people through "a
myriad of decisions in their quest to become more environmentally responsible citizens." (I am at
this moment sticking out my tongue and making a poking motion toward the back of my throat with the
index and middle fingers of my left hand.)
To the soundtrack of a re-recording of Cheap Trick's 1979 hit song Dream Police, the ad features
jumped-up little eco cops -- often wearing fetching shorts and driving Segway-like, three-wheeled,
enviro scooters -- harassing ordinary people about the green morality of their everyday consumer
choices.
On its website, Audi insists its ecocops are "not here to judge, merely to guide," yet the first
scene of the commercial features a young man paying for his groceries who chooses plastic over
paper. Suddenly, a Green Police officer springs up from behind, slams the shopper's face into the
price scanner and exclaims "You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy."
Yep, that's both gentle and non-judgmental, alright.
Next a swarm of greenies with badges is picking through garbage bins. When one finds an improperly
discarded battery, the officer in charge shouts "Let's take the house!"
A police helicopter shines its spotlight though the window of a residential kitchen onto a man
peeling an orange. "Put the rind down!," shouts an airborne officer into a megaphone. "That's a
compost infraction." The illicit peeler tries to run for it through his garage but is swarmed in
his driveway by an entire squad of Green Shirts.
A television news crew covers a "lightbulb crackdown," featuring the arrest of a homeowner who is
hustled into the back of an electric, golf-cart cum patrol car for "possession of an incandescent
lightbulb."
A pair of skateboarders has the contents of their water bottles poured out while being asked --
completely impartially, of course -- "What do you guys think about plastic bottles now?" Handcuffs
are slapped on a hot-tubber because his pool's temperature is one degree too high and trained
anteaters sniff out environmental contraband in vehicles stopped at a roadside check.
Even two regular police officers are pulled over by a Green counterpart for drinking coffee from
Styrofoam cups.
All the while, Cheap Trick sing "The Green Police, they live inside of my head. The Green Police,
they come to me in my bed. The Green Police, they're coming to arrest me, oh no." Hilarious,
because it is just plausible enough to believe something similar is in our futures.
Already, for instance, it's getting hard to find incandescent replacement bulbs at Canadian
hardware stores. By next year, when Ottawa's lightbulb ban kicks in, you'll have to buy them out of
the trunk of an emissions-belching '83 Impala in a darkened parking lot from some guy named Lex who
has H-E-L-L tattooed on his knuckles and drove the illegal lights over the line from Detroit.
(Don't forget to ask him about his three-for-one deal: a prohibited lamp, an unregistered handgun
and bag of crack.)
Audi reassures us we have nothing to fear. Lots of jurisdictions already have enviro-officers known
as Green Police -- that paragon of free choice, Vietnam, for instance! And the UK has what one
report calls "a group who dresses in green as part of the Environment Agency's squad to monitor
excessive CO2 emissions."
Oh, goody. That makes it all better. Last week, one of the recessed floodlights in my home office
burnt out. All I could find to replace it was a compact fluorescent masquerading as a flood. It's
so harsh my kids have nicknamed it Supernova. I have to wear welder's goggles when its on. But at
least the Green Police will know where to find me when they come for my stash...of disposable
diapers.
tunderbar
> http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/02/...
Give us your address, I'll send you a nickel so you can buy yourself a
sense of humor.
You'll need it as more and more people see agw for the joke that it is.