The Errant Æsthete

There are few barometers so reflective of modern life as TV advertising reports Richard Rapaport out of Ad Age. It makes sense. Take the culture’s most facile minds, challenge them to pry cash from an increasingly tapped-out audience, and what do you get? Commercials built on sadism, on derision, on one-upsmanship — in a word, “snide.”

The bottom line of snide advertising is a kind of Darwinian “survival of the snappiest,” requiring that you get the last word in any exchange and that it be a “gotcha.” “Can you handle it?” taunts a black-leathered vixen as she exits her black Suzuki XL7 sedan and throws the keys to a similarly garbed male model in the process of trading his motorcycle for her car. As he tosses the keys back, he growls with the nanny-nanny boo-boo that passes for wit these days, “Can you?”