The Real Thing?

My old friend Mort Allman just got out of rehab and sent me this quick commentary and link for your edification:

At the Library of Congress's American Memory site, you can view classic Coke commercials, including this "gem": the 'Hilltop' ad, wherein young hippy folks channel their youthful idealism into collective craving for sugar water. The site thankfully furnishes the lyrics, so we can appreciate the purity of expression and remarkable poetic richness of adverstising copy:

I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love,
Grow apple trees and honey bees, and snow white turtle doves.
I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,
I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.
[Repeat the last two lines, and in the background:]
It's the real thing, Coke is what the world wants today.

The insipid blend of greeting card verse, stock hippy ideology, and wide-eyed devotion to Coke is downright horrific. It's a classic example, though, of how advertising works. Take some honest, authentic sentiments, then wedge your brand right in their midst. Through bald juxtaposition, the Coke bottle inserts itself and assumes figural signficance as torch bearer, a signifier of the end of poverty, of global love, of pastoral peace, of the world speaking in one voice -- at the same time the phony, meaningless substitution eviscerates the referent, leaving nothing on the field but products to buy. The world envisioned in the Coke ad comes together for no other purpose than to buy Coke and keep IT company? Good God! How disturbing! Coke is what is real. Coke will not lead us to world peace and harmony, Coke epitomizes world peace and harmony. The world wants it. The world aspires to Cokedom. Surely, this kind of brainless feed prefigures the mass death of Jonestown, cultural imperialism, the slavish fascination with multinational cult brands like Disney, Pepsi, Nike, and the rest. In a 60 second spot, we spy the cooptation of youth culture, and the obliteration of authenticity by means of insidious irony, which hollows out the very thing it appropriates, flaunting its ridiculousness, leaving nothing else to buy but the blessed object, the product. It is worth reminding ourselves that Coca-cola has never, and will never, be the elixir that holds world society together. To entertain the fantasy is to submit oneself to a psychotic vision no less hallucinatory than an acid trip. And this, they say, is one of the best commercials of all time.