Nostradamus Served Cold

Welcome back. I’m ensconced, here, in the cave, though, for how much longer I can’t say. My wife is turning my lair into our children’s rumpus room. Stubbornly and with a modicum of passive aggressiveness, I shall continue to write until evicted by the press of oil-based Chinese-made toys, that my children adore and persistently chew.

But enough about me and my spatially challenged home. When it comes to understanding America’s place in its history, academics and media pundits can postulate on our 2.0 era, but can’t define its unraveling in “real time.” They can grope and jabber and appear learned in the face of abject redundancy, but who wants to read about today, yesterday? Television, especially its call-to-buy commercials, brings We The People into HD clarity with all the juicy parts normally saved for confession. The television commercial is enlightenment, a high-jinx brand peep show with a happy ending guaranteed. These 30-second slots are our cultural sextants, the maps by which we navigate our civilization and damn, don’t they just tickle our glib zeitgeist.

With this in mind, the question that emerges is where are we on our evolutionary odyssey? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? And does anyone care? According to Bud Lite, not only does America not give a hoot, by its calculations we’re two years from the end of days. True indeed, Nostradamus has penetrated beer psychology. And you know what? According to the boys at Bud, America is okay with that.

I’m referring to Bud Lite's Super Bowl Commercial, since Bud has another ad of similarly apocalyptic woe featuring a meteor winging earthward, begins with a forlorn group of airline passengers stranded on an island, the wreckage of what carried them smoldering in the background. Not too fantastic. In fact, this also is a prescient emblem of what’s to come. Anyhow, one passenger arrives from the wreckage carrying a black case, announcing, “Everyone, listen up! I’ve found the plane’s radio equipment. I think we can get off this island.” But wait, not so fast. By the water’s edge another passenger relays a different message, one of more infinite hope than the first, “Everyone, listen up, I’ve found the plane’s beverage cart,” he says breathlessly. “And it’s full of Bud Lite!” Let me ask you, as an American living in 2010, which would you choose? For the passengers it’s simple: Budweiser’s version of Miller Time.

Cruel delight aside. The message is one of renewed nihilism that goes beyond the denial of personal credit card debt being just numbers, raison d’etre being confused with WTF and retirement in the US of A being a pine box. Hell, have a beer and use what time is left to party on. Better to “bottoms up,” than to remove our collective bottom from the existential sling that has us comfortably couched? Better to mitigate the life and death circumstances with a cold one and hope tomorrow never comes. And better to go to hell refreshed and a little tipsy, than continue the manic dance of life. It is said, that along with predicting the end of days, that Nostradamus also foresaw 9/11, but that’s not the point; the point is beer and what you’ll be doing with it come the end. When it comes to luxury and downtime, advertising has successfully tapped into our Paleomammalian brains and figured out that culture isn’t about substance it’s about rapid-fire spanking new that distracts ourselves from ourselves and elevates the pleasure principle beyond existence itself. Bud-Lite has made a pact with THE END and Nostradamus is behind the bar twisting off caps and serving it cold.