Common Ground: Penguin Pitchmen

January 2007 | From the Editor

Penguin Pitchmen

TV commericals are selling us products with the cuddly appeal of the very wildlife the products themselves serve to destroy.

The only thing cooler in San Francisco these days than not watching TV is admitting to your friends who don’t that you do. It’s something sociologist might call post-rebellion rebellion. It posits that you’ve “advanced” to acceptance, as if this is the natural arc of things. As if rebellion is just a Neanderthal stage of the fully realized human. This is yet another of the reasons why the Paris Hilton brand of “cool” fails to serve. The same way you might find yourself knowing the latest about Hilton without ever seeking out this information in a copy of People is how I watch TV. By osmoccident (accident-osmosis).

Lately I’ve noticed that TV commercials are selling us products with the cuddly appeal of the very wildlife the products themselves serve to destroy.

Last month, a “Christmas Sale” spot came on for The Gap featuring an animated snow owl perched in the trunk of a tree. So cute! Hey, wait. Isn’t The Gap owned by a logging company? Or how about the one where a pixilated, taxidermy-ed, duck-billed platypus bonds effortlessly with a honkin’, carbon-spewing SUV that is, when not posed on a sound stage, degrading all our ecosystems including that of the platypus. Yet despite their conflicting interests, the large vehicle and the endangered (and stuffed) creature enjoy a very genial, polite conversation for thousands of dollars per second on national TV.

This ad trend is a mass consumer Maalox-ing designed to offer relief for all the scary news about the environment and to keep us buying into our unsustainable consumption patterns. “Spend as usual, people! Everything’s fine.” Advertising agencies plop, plop, fizz, fizz our anxiety by presenting their client’s products as being implicitly endorsed by nature. Or being part of nature itself, as in some truck ads where muscle-y two-tons play “tag” with a mountain lion just like the ones these very trucks run over in real life on Southern California roadways as developers consume natural habitats to build exurban McMansions with pickups parked in their driveways. Tag! You’re it, Morris! Morris?

But there’s no hotter, more soothing pitchmen right now than polar bears and penguins. Not only do these cuter-than-Paris Hilton critters — who have the most to lose the fastest from our unmitigated lifestyles — seem to be giving a thumbs-up for product X, Y or Z, but their very appearance in general is reassuring. “Look! The [animated] penguins are happy! In fact, they’re dancing! Yaaaaaay…!” Too bad 3-D penguins and polar bears don’t get SAG money. I understand they’re in the market for ice machines.

The conspiracy theorist in me says that the animated family movie about the tap-dancing penguin, Happy Feet, was pure propaganda to subliminally reassure us about global warming. The film was made by a subsidiary of Time Warner, the largest media company — and the biggest destination of advertising dollars — in the world. And who spends more advertising dollars than automotive?

So while corporations co-opt Arctic wildlife for their purposes of revenue generation, environmentalists are adopting a very different critter as a new poetically apt post-consumer mascot: the sloth (check out a review of Hanging with The Sloth on p. 34). The original tree-huggers, these harmless varmints live in the canopies of the rainforests of Central and South America and embody all the personality traits I wish we could fuel-inject into every Hummer-buyer in Marin.

Sloths consume less, eat local (leaves), conserve energy, and hurt not a flea. Enlightened sloths munch lazily, go for a cool swim, have sex, and climb to the top limbs to soak up some rays with a good book. They mind their own business.

If we as a civilization could learn to externally realize our inner sloth, maybe the penguins and polar bears wouldn’t be reduced to animated pitchmen anymore, or sweaty, lonely exhibits in the local zoo.

—Todd Spencer

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