This past weekend I was traveling and stopped for a rest break at a turnpike restaurant along a major Interstate. It was the usual thing you would expect….a lot of fast food franchise outlets jammed inside a large high-ceilinged building wih a souvenir shop near the front door filled with a lot of tacky crap and fatty sugary snack foods. I tried to find a bottle of milk….there wasn’t any. It was all high fat, high salt foods and sodas….LOTS of sodas.
As I walked into the food court, my eye caught a sign and what was on that sign has been bothering me ever since I saw it. No…not just bothering me. Really pissing me off….because what was on it, was the clearest example I’ve seen of the cynical disconnect between our daily lives and what we are doing in the Middle East. More below the jump:
The sign stood next to a line of people waiting to purchase their choice of soft drinks from a large machine dispensing ice and a sizable array of sodas. The upright cardboard display was emblazoned with the Coca Cola logo and bore the following message:
“When you order a 32-ounce Coke, a portion of the proceeds will go to support our troops.”
“What the hell,” I thought. Coke has just created the marketing equivalent of that ubiquitous magnetic ribbon loop on cars reading “Support the Troops.” It’s something tens of thousands mindlessly display without ever asking themselves just what they really mean by ‘Support the Troops.’ It’s a buzz phrase….a quick way to demonstrate that we somehow care when in fact all we have done is give money to some slick marketer of plastic patriotism without ever really doing anything meaningful to actually support our troops.
And clearly the folks at Coke had seen the value of making that same link work to help them market more of their product. You can see the cynical thinking behind that offer:
“Let’s make sure they don’t just get themselves a standard 12-ounce soda. Let’s get them to triple their consumption and go for a whole damned quart of Coke by appealing to their partriotic instincts. Tell them if they go for the big one, they’ll be ‘supporting the troops.”
And the more I have thought about this, the madder I get. This is what we have come to…schlocking massively large unhealthy volumes of soda by linking it with patriotism. Instead of REALLY doing something to support the troops….like screaming at our representatives to do what we voted they should do and end the conflict or at least provide our troops with the armor and equipment they need and the medical care and the veterans support -- we just slug down a quart of branded sugar water and get a warm glow and a healthy set of early onset diabetes for ourselves and our kids.
It is easy to understand why Coke loves a Middle East war. At 120 degrees in the shade on a good day, they surely must unload tons of the stuff on our men and women in harm’s way.
And now, every time each of us on the home front slurps down another quart of their fine brew, we can show the troops how much we appreciate all they are doing for us….and then put it all out of our minds while a few hundred more of them are killed, disfigured, wounded, shredded and forced to endure unconsionable stresses, all in support of God, country, and goddamn Coca Cola.