Us vs Them

This NRA ad is so twisted and vicious that I hate to sully Helytimes with it.  You don’t have to watch it, I will tell you the key parts.

From the woman’s tone to the images it is so intense, so designed to provoke fear and anger.

Imagine something less helpful than showing this to a fearful person or a deranged person who also owned a gun.

I learned a tiny bit about the woman in the ad and I don’t want to ever think about her again.

I do want to examine the use of the words “us” and “them” in the ad.

Sometimes I felt frustrated by the attempt to over-explain Trump’s popularity as just racism because I felt that like while racism was absolutely in the mix, that wasn’t a big enough word.  What I really heard was something like “themism.”

Themism

It was obvious to anyone I talked to at Trump’s rally or the RNC that I was a “them” even though I felt like we were and could be and should be an “us.”

Who is them and who is us?

In the first twenty seconds of this ad, you hear about how “they use”:

• “their media”
• “their schools”
• “their movies stars
• their singers
• their comedy shows
• their awards shows”

(with lots of exterior shots of LA, by the way, including Disney Hall)

• “their ex-president”

As a media-working school-liking person who works on a comedy show in LA who loves and gave money to my ex-president, I am obviously a them.

What the hell?  I want to be an us!

I am an us!

Who is the us, according to the ad?

Well, against the them is:

• “the law-abiding”

Me, definitely, I love the law, some of the people closest to me are professional law enforcers.

• “the police”

Same, I love one police in my own life and like the police in general.

So, I am also an us.

Right?

Can I be an us and a them?

What kind of wicked, nasty person would try and drive us apart like that?  What sinister agenda would be behind that?

Anyone trying to divide us is wicked.

Which is better:  united or divided?

Uniter or divider?

Everyone knows the answer to that.  This is the United States.

If you are trying to divide, if you are sowing division, you doing wickedness.  This is simple.

This ad is some kind of vicious dog-whistle designed make some loose category of people who feel angry and put upon and threatened feel more angry, put upon, and threatened.  This ad uses the language of violence to suggest channeling those feelings into violence.

In this world you will see so much wickedness that you can’t possibly handle it all but somehow this one got to me.

Part of what makes me made is that a club for people who like shooting guns could be so positive.  Lots of people in this country have guns because they like hunting or because guns are exciting.  What if they were in a club that made them feel proud and noble instead of vicious and afraid?

The language about the “well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment is so important. Adding those words was not an accident.  The Founders didn’t want every gun-haver running around on his own kick deciding who to blast away.  Read

or

A militia was a community.  It brought people together.  And it was a responsibility.  To call this NRA video irresponsible is a wild understatement.

I suspect I have no more than two Helytimes readers who are in the NRA.  There has to be a faction of the NRA that can see how wrong this ad is, how destructive.  I could be wrong but my guess is this strategy of marketing for the NRA will not be successful.

My purpose in writing this was just to bore down and clarify mostly for myself what is so wrong and wicked about this ad and what larger principle that leads us to.

Also to shine a light on why the message is not just wicked but un-American.

A Smaller Thing That Made Me Mad From This Ad

:16

“make them march, make them protest”

let’s pause here and remember you can say whatever the hell you want about movie stars and comedy shows but marching and protesting in American history is maybe not all the time but by an overwhelming margin a pretty darn heroic and positive thing in American history.

A Leonard Freed Magnum photo from the 1963 March on Washington. Am I allowed to use this? Maybe not technically but is it ok because I direct you to the source? Hmm am I as law-abiding as I thought?

the ad is ignorant as well as wicked, the two often go hand in hand.

WD Cooper’s engraving of the Boston Tea Party