Assvertising

Apparently, this advert has been airing for awhile, but Iain and I only saw it for the first time last night:


If you can't view the video, a series of screencaps is here, and the brief description is a Scottish dude—whose Scottishness is noted not just by his accent, but by his (obviously fake) ginger beard and matching tartan hat and necktie—runs around finding people who say that all synthetic oils are the same and smacking them with a dipstick while shouting the catchphrase, "Think with your dipstick, Jimmy!"

When we saw this, I looked at Iain expectantly, the same way he looks at me when we've just seen a blatantly misogynist advert. "What did you think about that, babe?" I asked him.

"It's insulting," he replied, with the same sort of terse annoyance that greets any mention of the Green Ogre Who Shall Not Be Named, which is likely to set off Iain on a rant about its having been formulated from a collection of negative stereotypes of the Scots—grumpy, penny-pinching, misanthropic, hulking oafs. The dour Scots. For some reason, Iain doesn't find amusing a movie about tolerance whose main character reinforces an ugly stereotype most of its viewers are too ignorant to realize even exists.

He's so touchy. Always looking for things to get mad about, that one.

One of the, ahem, interesting things about this country's history of treating race as a binary—white and nonwhite, with who is (and isn't) white determined by a constantly (and still) fluid definition—is that the lines between "white" cultures and disparate "white" ethnicities get blurred in service of the idea of a single "white" race. But stuff like this advert makes quite evident the strained seams of that false construct.

[Assvertising: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine, Thirty, Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, Thirty-Three, Thirty-Four, Thirty-Five, Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, Forty, Forty-One, Forty-Two, Forty-Three, Forty-Four, Forty-Five, Forty-Six, Forty-Seven, Forty-Eight, Forty-Nine, Fifty, Fifty-One, Fifty-Two, Fifty-Three, Fifty-Four, Fifty-Five, Fifty-Six.]