The Stupidest Memorial Day Ad I Ever Saw

It was during Reagan's first term of course.

‘Patriotic Pampered Pocket Pooch Posing Proudly.’ Photo (cropped) by Randy Robertson, 2008. Creative Commons License 2.0 This sweet little doggo was not in the stupidest Memorial Day ad.

[Editrix’s Note: Ziggy will be hosting an extra bonus Memorial Day matinee today at 4 p.m.; it is probably going to be M*A*S*H!]

I’m happy to say that after a cursory search I could not find an online copy of the stupidest Memorial Day TV ad I’ve ever seen, so lucky you. To be completely honest, I don’t even recall when I saw it. If it was in black and white, then I saw it in 1981 on my crappy dorm room 19-inch TV — that was a big screen for a black and white, bought for $15 from a motel that had either finally upgraded to color sets or was just cleaning out its storage room. But if it was in color, then I saw it in my very first Flagstaff apartment in 1982, on my mom’s old 12-inch Sony Trinitron that she’d bought when I was 10, our first color set. I think I remember the ad being in color, but then, a lot of people think they remember seeing red blood going down the drain in the shower scene in Psycho.

In either case, it was definitely one of those years, because Ronald Reagan was still in his first term and being all warmongery, as was his style in those days. I was a very earnest college liberal, worried quite tangibly about the need to put together a file to document my claim to be a conscientious objector in case the draft came back, but also so thoroughly disorganized (we didn’t know ADHD was a thing yet) that I never got very far beyond buying the Handbook for Conscientious Objectors, reading some pamphlets from the American Friends Service Committee, and drafting in my head a statement that I now suspect would have been far too reliant on Kurt Vonnegut quotes if I’d written it down.

Reagan was going to get us into a war, everybody expected that. I probably wouldn’t even have time to worry about being a conscientious objector because the missiles would fly and it would all be over in an hour, and then after that the nuclear winter would finish off the survivors.

I don’t know about you, gentle readers of a certain age, but when I was home for winter break one Christmas Eve, I freaked out for a second when the promo for the upcoming late local news announced that NORAD radar was tracking unidentified airborne objects closing on North American airspace from the North Pole. You know, the fun Santa-tracking announcement.

Hell, that was all before Reagan’s 1984 live-mic “joke” about how he’d outlawed the Soviet Union and “we begin bombing in five minutes.” And even before Soviet fighter jets shot down that off-course Korean Airlines 747 that strayed over Sakhalin Island in 1983, killing all aboard including a rightwing congressman, Larry McDonald, a John Birch Society Georgia Democrat back when there were still far-right Democrats.

These paragraphs have been atmospheric context for the worst Memorial Day TV ad I’ve ever seen, so now let’s get to the commercial, which promoted a major-brand car dealership in Phoenix, I don’t recall which brand. Unlike a lot of holiday car dealer ads, it wasn’t pitching a special holiday sale with amazing deals; instead, it was a “message” ad. I don’t remember the script or the visuals for the most part; it might have opened on a panorama of a military cemetery. The narrator gave, as I recall, a little sermonette about how in recent years patriotism had somehow fallen out of favor with too many Americans, and maybe respect for the military too — something along those lines. There had to be some martial music playing underneath, too, maybe just trumpets or a bugle or something, but not “Taps,” because I know I’d have remembered that.

But I vividly remember the ad’s climactic moment, which was a fairly close shot of the cemetery, white headstones and green grass. As the narrator said something along the lines of “But now, American patriotism (or American greatness, or pride in America, something in that vein) is BACK!” and on that key word, in closeup, a hand plunged the staff of a small American flag — a foot or so high at most, more of a stick than a staff — into the grass of the burial ground, defiantly, at an angle, like the patriotic car dealership was the freaking Marines on Iwo Jima. That may or may not have been followed by a pledge that we would never forget our brave military heroes again.

It was so stunningly sincere and kitschy that it has stayed with me ever since, that completely banal expression of patriotism, a little flag like you’d see people waving at any parade, but framed as a defiant act of courage in the face of some imaginary horde of radical hippies, all potted up on disco and Marx.

It was from the same well of reactionary sentiment and imagined victimhood that may have been why my mother put a transparent “Our Flag: Love It or Leave It” sticker in the rear window of our ‘63 Impala station wagon. Or more recently, the trucker cap I saw during the 2008 election that had Old Glory on it, surrounded by the words “TRY BURNING THIS ONE … ASSHOLE!” — as if radical America-hating flag burners were so plentiful that the wearer expected to encounter them any time they left the house.

So for this Memorial Day, I’m going to boldly declare myself unafraid to watch anime most of the day and probably read another chapter of Reaganland, Rick Perlstein’s magnificent history of the time leading up to that stupidest Memorial Day ad ever. And nobody can stop me.

Mega-Patriotic OPEN THREAD.

[Photo (cropped) by Randy Robertson, 2008. Creative Commons License 2.0]

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