Of Red Barons and Book Clubs

Curmie can’t speak for everyone, but he’s a little starved for something, anything, other than politics.  Perhaps you are, as well, Gentle Reader.  The thought that anyone would vote for either of the likely contenders for the presidency (as opposed to against the alternative) is chilling.  So Curmie has been casting about, looking for something else to write about.  This may not be much, but at least it’s something.  And Curmie did sort of open the door for this kind of post last Christmas season with an analysis of ads for Monopoly.

Red Baron (the pizza company, not Snoopy’s antagonist, but why pass up an opportunity like this?) has released a trio of new commercials, all connected to the joys of sharing.  They’re not going to convince Curmie and Beloved Spouse to buy their product—we’ve tried it and found the gustatory difference between it and cardboard to be insignificant (your mileage may vary), but that doesn’t mean their commercials are similarly boring.

Indeed, “Baddie Librarians,” in which two stereotypically bespectacled (complete with glasses chains) older women naughtily share a pizza intended for a single person, is trite but at least reasonably cute.  “Hipsters” is even more fun, as sharing a delicious pizza leads to sharing of a different sort: one character “shares” that he’s tired of being hip, another (her name is Willow, of course) admits that she doesn’t even know what her neck tattoo means, the pizza is described as “way better than kale” (I’ll grant that much), and kombucha is called “garbage water.”  It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but at least it brings a smile.

“Book Club” starts down the same road, but it takes a wrong turn.  Sharing the pizza prompts one woman to “share” that she didn’t actually read the book.  Indeed, no one has; the closest anyone can come is the hostess, Linda, who “watched the movie last night.”  So far, so good.  But the ensuing dialogue goes like this:

-- I judged it by its cover.

-- I haven’t read a book since middle school.

-- I’m secretly seeing two other book clubs.  [What?]

-- I can’t even read.  [He’s holding the book upside-down.]

-- I’m not really Gary.  He just paid me to be here.  [Again, what?]

If “Hipsters” showed something like a moment of enlightenment for the characters—they’re questioning their past pretentiousness in the name of hipness—“Book Club” seems to excuse that very pomposity and deception.  If Willow and her friends begin to re-evaluate the illusory benefits of being hip, Linda and her book club giggle about how cute it is to be superficial, anti-intellectual, illiterate, and deceitful.  Eating that tasty pizza brings the hipsters to a realization that “kale sucks”; for the book-clubbers, though, it prompts only the joys of shared ignorance and imbecility.

No, I’m not blaming the purveyors of frozen pizza for the decline of thoughtful analysis that has characterized the last couple of decades in this country.  But that one ad in particular, while not a contagion, is at least a symptom.

One of the first papers Curmie wrote as an undergrad was for a class on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  (I ended up in that class because my first couple of choices for a Freshman Seminar were full when I tried to register, and I’d at least heard of Rousseau.)  We’d just read Émile, in which one of the key points was that what we try to teach and what a child sees in that pedagogical moment do not always coincide.  We were assigned to write a short analysis of a contemporary story or event from the perspective of such a child.

I don’t remember what I wrote about (it was over a half century ago… ouch!), but the assignment itself keeps re-appearing in my consciousness after all this time.  I know what “Book Club” intends its message to be, but what I see is “stupid, incurious, and artificial people like our product.”

Dammit, it seems like Curmie is writing about politics, after all…  

A slightly edited version of this piece appears under the (better) title of “Curse You, Red Baron!” on the Ethics Alarms site.