love letters from my 34th summer

To view the ad go here.

Anheuser-Busch, Inc.
One Busch Place
St. Louis, MO 63118

Dick Rogers, President and CEO
DDB Advertising North America
200 East Randolph
Chicago, IL 60601

Dear Budweiser and Dick,

Please, make it stop. I beg you.

Now, I realize the end of the world is nigh. This is one of several truths that have become apparent to me since the first time I saw your commercial entitled Anthem during week one of the NFL football season. Now the playoffs are here, and I am still seeing and hearing Anthem. So before polar caps melt, seas boil, stars drip with blood, Earth cracks along the Equator, or Jessica Simpson says something smart, I need you to pull this commercial from the air.

Several things about Anthem make me weep for our future, and I will be plain about them with you.

1.) The hook to the song/commercial: “This is Budweiser/This is beer.” DDB North America is a large respectable (as much as ad agencies can be) firm. I’m sure the creative talent you employ (even in Chicago) can do better than this. I am certain the first time this commercial aired during week one of the NFL football season, and the first time millions of happy, football-watching minions heard this commercial, one unanimous response was hurled back at the television. Did you hear us in your offices in Chicago? Did you, Anheuser-Busch, hear us in your grain elevators in St. Louis? You should have. It was two words, but sang like a mini-anthem from Phoenix to Seattle to Green Bay to Buffalo to Charlotte to Tampa Bay. I think I yelled it the loudest.

“No Shit.”

Is there really confusion about the nature of your product? Are people often at a loss when forced to classify the liquid you so meticulously bottle and stamp with Born on Dating? Do grocery stores still mistakenly put your product in the dairy section next to rice milk? Have those silly theories about your product actually coming from Clydesdales begun to hurt your bottom line? Did you think America hasn’t been paying attention? Or maybe you thought we forgot what it was you actually made. More probable is that you believe the demographic you are targeting, football fans, is really that dense. And this is what distresses me most.

It is perhaps a chicken-or-the-egg question. Do you give us this excuse for an advertisement because we are drooling Neanderthals? Or. Are we drooling Neanderthals because you give us this excuse for an advertisement? Play it safe. Give us a television spot that isn’t reduced to the most elementary syllogism in logic: A is A, so A is A. Please, give us something harder. If we get it wrong, then we don’t deserve to drink your beer, but at least you’ll know you’ve tried.

You could, if you so choose, even say: “This is Budweiser/This is Good Beer.” See how that small nuance makes the commercial, while still not a strong commercial, a bit more substantial than the present declarative sentence on which you hang your advertising hat? Perhaps, legally, you aren’t allowed to say that because it’s not true. Your beer is not good. Maybe your ad was better before the pesky Legal Department got involved. This is simply the result of the lawyers having their way. If this is the case, please forward my letter on to the suits down in Legal. As it stands, your declaration sounds as convincing as the following slogans:

This is West Virginia/ This is a state to the west of Virginia.

This is Kraft./This is cheese (processed food product).

This is Canada./ This is still a country and has lots of parking.

This is the Church of Christian Science./This is technically a religion too

2.) You call your ad spot Anthem. You make beer, not even very good beer, and you have an anthem? That’s a little, um, insane. Do your employees have to sing it every morning before they pledge allegiance to the Anheuser-Busch flag? Is Budweiser trying to stir up some type of secessionist, beer militia? In your utopist, beer-inspired future, will St. Louis be the new capital? Will the leader of this fledgeling republic be Augustus Busch? Caesar Augustus Busch?

Let me break it down. At the beginning of the ad, the crappy, generic rock starts playing softly, and we see quick shots of a cowboy and his horse (stereotype), an Asian man at his laptop (stereotype much?), an African-American policewoman directing traffic (stereotype), nothing (were there no available images of Hassidic jewelers counting money?), a sunset over a large city, a fly over of a bucolic small town (red state), a mail box (what says beer like the mail?), freshly hung laundry flapping in the breeze, a young man in a white t-shirt and a red hat talking to an old man in a white t-shirt and a red hat over a white fence (I do tear up a bit for .05 seconds), a housetop party, a subway, a garage band, a football team, people tail-gating wearing the same colors as the football team, a bus driver (I couldn’t find her can of Budweiser, but I’m sure it’s hidden in the picture), rail workers, more cops…this time on horseback(cops and firemen make it into more beer commercials than beer, which makes you wonder who needs the breathalyzers), a man in a tie and a dress shirt next to a man in a flannel shirt at a bar (both drinking some type of new wheat and grain based drink that Budweiser has invented), guys sitting on Harley’s (”Drink our beer, then go sit on your bike, but please don’t drive off and terrorize Rolling Stones fans” isn’t as catchy), then we see the city of St. Louis. This ad is so sweet and apple pie that it hurts my teeth. It also hurts my hand, but that’s because I shove sharp objects into the flesh off my hand to distract myself from the pain. Still, I don’t mind a little sappy Americana. But then I hear the words:

“This is what I call mine/This is true/This is Budweiser.”

That’s when the music cranks up, and the proud Die Zeit ohne Beispiel inspired Budweiser images start: grain elevators with the letters B-U-D-W-E-I-S-E-R painted in Budweiser’s national colors (red), Clydesdales, cold draft Bud being emptied out on the ground, and Bud’s poster child, NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. (He is also a spokesperson for Wrangler Jeans. Yep, they still make Wrangler jeans, and they have a spokesperson. Maybe your ad agency could help them out after you get done making a new ad for Budweiser.)

All I wanted to do was watch some football, but instead I am being re-educated by fanatical, conniving brewmeisters. Plus blood is coming from my ears due to a genre of music called “country-rock.”

3.) “This is where I live/This is where I’m from/This is what I believe when the day is done.” This is where I conclude my letter to you. First you dumb it down by stating the obvious, then you try to get us all to drink the Budweiser flavored Kool-Aid, and then you go way out there and equate drinking Budweiser with some type of Kierkegaardian existential leap of faith. “This is what I believe in when the day is done?” You still just make beer, right? Is there something else I should know about? When I contemplate those large questions in life and when I think to myself, “What do I believe in?” I am quite certain Budweiser won’t be one of the top five million or so things that pop into my brain.

In case I have been too negative, let me concede your commercial is catchy. The song sticks in my head. This is not a large accomplishment. I still have Cindi Lauper’s song, True Colors, stuck in my head (and I rarely question my sexuality). That Band-Aid song is still stuck (no pun intended) in my head, but I don’t use Band-Aid Brand (I am a real man, so I use electrical tape and old socks when I get a wound). You also have some gosh-darn nice images in your ad.

But this is the only commercial I have ever seen that manages to shoot too low and too high all at once. This is the only commercial I have ever seen that results immediately in the gnashing of teeth and the putting-on of sack cloth and ashes. Every time I see this commercial, I expect to see in that montage a brief image of fire and Nero playing his violin.

Please, I beg you. Pull this commercial from regular rotation during football games. You could even move it over to Lifetime where nobody will ever see it. Make it stop. You win. It’s beer. I’m not prepared to argue the point. I am at your mercy.

Yours Truly,

Jamie Doom

Excuse the double negative, but I can’t have nothin’. I would love to pretend that I notice and indeed relish the small pleasures in life, but it has become increasingly apparent that even those small pleasures will always be just out of my reach. “Example please” says you. “Last Wednesday,” says me.

The calendar date was actually December 14, 2005, The Year of Our Lord. I had just paid myself two days early. I am able to do that because among other things, I do our accounting at my job, and writing myself a check a couple of days early is one the perks of being the book keeper at the rather small company that has had the good sense to employ me. Of course nobody else gets paid early, and I do hope this is between you and me, fair reader.

After work, I had some money in my pocket, and I immediately went off to pay bills. I was quite positive I needed to pay my cell phone bill because my phone service had been suspended a few days before. This is how I am always sure that my phone bill is dilatory, and must be paid. Sure, for those friends that need to reach me during the time my phone service is suspended and the time that I pay myself early, it is a bit inconvenient. But for me, brief periods of not being plugged into the grid are therapeutic and restful. Wait, did I just make a Matrix allegory? My geekness is increasing with every web log post, no doubt.

So, off I went to Verizon, and in I walked to pay my phone bill. And there was my friend Bernard paying his bill at the self service kiosk just inside the door. Actually, it wasn’t him at all. But I didn’t realize that until I had said “what’s up man” to the stranger trying to pay his phone bill. He looked at me as if trying to place me, shrugged his shoulders, decided to play along, and said “you know how we do.” This forced but pleasant banter went along for a couple of minutes after that. He even stuck around and chatted when it was my turn. We compared how much money we had shoved into the machine. He had fed the Verizon self-rape machine $160.00, whereas, I had only given it $140.00. We walked outside together shaking our heads at what Verizon was doing to the good hard-working people of Asheville, NC. He said “‘the Verizon self-rape kiosk’, now I gotta remember that,” waved and got into his car.

Despite lightening my wad by $140.00, I was feeling warm inside on this cold, cold day in December. This was actually the coldest day of the season so far, and what I did not know then is that an ice storm would attack Asheville that evening, knock the power out at my place of work, and allow me to sleep in the next morning. I did not know that then, but still I was happy. I had just had one of those interactions with a stranger that could have gone off in an awkward way but did not. It was then that I made my most fateful decision of the day. I would reward myself with Starbucks and more specifically a Venti, Caramel Machiatto.

Now before you gather your anti-globalization friends to firebomb my street and turn over the BMW parked in front of my apartment, please know that I do not usually go to Starbucks. I was making an exception today because it was cold and Starbucks has a drive through, and also because Caramel Machiattos, though evil and exploitive, are delicious. So before you convince Bono and Chris Martin of Coldplay(both faithful readers of this Blog) to hold a benefit concert to encourage the French and the hippies to loot all the Shuggie Otis CD’s and John Coltrane posters from my residence, let me say that I usually only drink coffee made with Fair Trade beans and flavored with Fair Trade yak milk and Fair Trade Bolivian honey bee honey. In fact, I take it a step farther. Fair trade is not enough. I make sure that the people who grew my Arabica beans actually exploited the independent coffee shop that I frequent. I make sure that I pay more for the yak milk than I would normally pay for a yak. But on this day it was cold. I was weak, and again I must insist: Caramel Macchiatos are delicious.

So I paid my four dollars for my Caramel Macchiatos and gave a dollar tip to the cute barista who had taken my order and had not judged me. As I was pulling out of Starbucks and checking traffic both ways for any of my activist friends, I decided that nothing goes better with a Caramel Macchiato than a Nat Sherman cigarette. So I carefully lit one of those skinny, dark brown cancer sticks and made a right turn. I could smell a lot of caramel and some macchiato. I had carefully wedged my venti drink in between my legs. BMWs of my year and model do not come with cup holders. They turn on a dime, but there is nowhere to put your Caramel Macchiato except your lap. Germans try to be funny at the weirdest of times. I am heading down the four lane road when suddenly I do the strangest thing.

I slammed on my brakes to stop at a yellow traffic light. All my life yellow has meant speed up. I have never slowed down or stopped at any yellow light that I can ever remember. Ever. Asheville has notoriously long yellow traffic lights. It embodies Asheville’s very damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t attitude. Our yellow lights are longer than our green lights. So I never stop at them. But today I did. I was driving along, saw the light was yellow and suddenly this unexplainable fear gripped me. I slammed on my brakes, and my Caramel Macchiato crashed into the foot that was on the brake pedal, and the lid came off, and suddenly my floor had three inches of wonderful, caramel colored liquid sloshing around in it.

Quickly, I grabbed the cup which was now floating on top of the new pond in my floor board and noticed the little bit of froth attached to the bottom. I drank that tiny little sip, and let me tell you something. That was the best freaking coffee drink I have ever had in my life. That little sip was so delicious that my eyes began to swell up with tears. I threw my cigarette at my feet in disgust, and then started to worry about electrical fires. By my quick estimations looking at what was covering the drivers side floor board of a BMW 325i, a Starbucks venti container holds about seven gallons. I never knew it was that much until I saw it all at once out of the container. The light turned green, and as I was contemplating if my feet were safe on the accelerator something almost creepy happened. All the liquid disappeared. One minute I holding my knees up to my chin while I was trying to take off from a traffic light (this is hard because after perusing my backseat I realized that I did not in fact have a large stick with which I could control my gas and brakes), and the next minute I was timidly putting my feet (which were already wet from the initial soaking) back where they belonged.

I am still not completely certain where my Caramel Macchiato went, but later that night as the temperature dropped even more, one of my friends got into the back seat of my car and said something about a brown ice skating rink.

I have a cold now which I blame on that cursed event. That evening I was never able to make it home and change my shoes and socks. So my feet remained cold and wet for most of the night. Everywhere I went I left little caramel footprints. It’s hard to be smooth with the ladies when your feet smell like coffee and whipped cream…or is it?

So if this cold worsens, and I am suddenly taken off of this earth, don’t blame the weather or the rough flu season. Just know that the thing I wanted most in my life killed me, but only after it had let me have a very small taste.

*Your cry for help, in the form of this call, has gone unnoticed yet again. I hope you won’t do anything foolish with that Drano and those darvasets until I call you back.

*Maybe I’ll never know what it was you wanted to say to me on this cold gray day in December. Maybe, it will remain one of those heart-wrenching mysteries that accompany my tired bones to the grave. But hopefully you’ll hear this recorded message and sense my earnestness and something inside you will decide not to let that happen.

*Honestly, I am able to come to the phone right now, so I’m not even going to go through the sad motions of pretending that I really wanted to talk to you. Obviously, if I had wanted to talk to you, come hell or high water, I would have. You can be sure of that. So basically the purpose of this message is to let you know that you aren’t really my friend, and it’s foolish for us to even pretend anymore. Leave a message at the beep

*When was it, as the civilized, that we stopped talking face to face? When did we sell the birthright of daily human communion for the mess of porridge called convenience? When did Nokias replace social grace? Leave a message, sheep.

*Inexplicably, while you were using your thumb to find my name in the address book of your phone, I was walking outside and hooking up the hose, and gently spraying my gardenias and humming an old English hymn. All the time a wry smile was beginning to creep onto my face. So if you want to ruin my bliss, keep calling me.

*If the social and psychological stress of leaving a properly worded message is too difficult for you to bear, I will try to understand and abide it. I will try not to see your name in the queue of missed calls and wonder why, oh why, you called but did not leave of message.

*Obviously this isn’t working out. You keep calling it “phone tag”…like your flippancy won’t add to my anguish…like this is some type of fun game…us seeking desperately…but never quite actually…talking to each other. So if you have reached this message, it’s because I am standing on a very large bridge contemplating which to heave from its cold, hard railing. Myself or the Nokia?

*Life, as it often does, has played another one of its cruel tricks. For you have called at entirely the wrong time. For, regretfully, I am detained or perhaps otherwise engaged and either cannot or will not answer the phone. But do not lose heart fair caller, for I shall call you back in the bye and bye. Fair thee well.

“It is quite true that Americans value democracy It is quite false that they value liberty. Whole sects and societies [of Americans] would treat tobacco not merely as a poison but as a sort of infernal drug invented by demons. All the American virtues and vices mingle in this national instinct for persecution. It has the democratic spirit, in the spontaneous movement of the masses. It has the optimistic spirit, in the facile faith in the result of a new law or regulation. But to say that it has the spirit of individual liberty is claptrap.” GK Chesterton, 1923.

“The man who is silly enough to say, when offered a cigarette, ‘I have no vices,’ may not always deserve the rapier-thrust of the reply given by the Italian Cardinal, ‘It is not a vice, or doubtless you would have it.’” GK Chesterton, 1923

I know many who’ve lived in China probably come home and blame some strange new quirk or tick on China. I can see that expat now– suddenly having this urge to always squat when he goes to the bathroom—his roommate wondering why there are now footprints on the toilet seat. Or maybe his table etiquette is suddenly lacking—he sticks the bowl directly under his nose and scrapes the food in his mouth, pausing from time to time to spit the bones on the floor.

So, as I say this, I say it with a certain amount of guilt. Ultimately, I’m responsible for my own decisions and my own actions. I gladly own up to this. But what I am about to say is the truth. China enabled my smoking addiction. There. After typing it, I like the way it looks on paper. China did not cause me to keep smoking cigarettes. But China is the reason I started. It’s true, and these are the facts.