the corner office

There's a lame-ass Coca-Cola advert on at the moment, one of the usual 60-second sickeningly emotive pop-culture monologues in which a hip young dude explains why Coca Cola is the choice of this, past and future generations, referencing nearly every saccharine pop-culture artefact from the past decade and why the world wouldn't be the same without it. Now, you have to believe that most people see through this crap without too much effort. But hey, presumably this helps to sell Cokes, so what do I know.

What really gets me is the final line... "blah blah blah blah (for bloody ever) blah blah blah, like Che, like my Dad." And young fella takes a swig of Coke while the emotive music reaches a crescendo and causes lounge windows to rattle across the country.

And an otherwise boring advert descends to new levels of stupidity. Like Che? At first I thought I'd misheard - but no, this kid invokes the name of that most famous of icons, the hot-liberal-arts-chicks-will-shag-me-now t-shirts, the definitive I'm-an-individualist-and-angry-with-the-world-and-this-t-shirt-that-every-other-brain-dead-wannabe-rebel-wears-proves-it icon of the late 20th century.

Just how many human beings are there who could seriously associate drinking Coke, a product sold across the world by an obscenely successful American corporation, with an anti-American socialist? How ignorant do you have to be, or how ignorant do you have to believe your target market is, to come up with an advert like that?

On second thought, don't answer.

I'm one of the last people to buy into the rah-rah-western-values-and-exported-democracy schtick and I fully understand and support the need to give mainstream society and our otherwise hypocritical western norms the finger when needed, which is just about all the time, but I've alway been in favour of reason and rational thought and respect for humanity and personal freedom and dignity in doing so.

But please. Che Guevara, Mr Firing Squad/Labour Camp himself, an anti-democratic totalitarian, used to sell Coca Cola in an advert hailing 10 years of democracy and freedom in South Africa?

The mind boggles.