Many conservatives and capitalists watching the Super Bowl were stunned by the Audi ad mocking a “Green Police” force that would arrest you for having an incandescent light bulb or other offenses against environmental correctness. At the end, Audi touted its A3 TDI clean-diesel car as the greenest choice. But will the political effect of the ad linger? At the Huffington Post, environmental writer David Roberts asserts that Audi did not mean to lampoon greens. No, this ad was a cry for help, a grudging bow of respect to moral authority in the middle of a swamp of Super Bowl commercialism:
Some of America’s biggest corporations seemed to be trying to play to Teabag America, and the results were as bitter as the teabaggers themselves. Amidst the dreck was a commercial from Audi featuring the “green police.”
At first blush this seems like more teabagging — appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins. If you check in the comments under the video, that perspective is well represented. Says Metallicafan6611, “You guys all laugh. But this is really going to happen. Wake up people!? Stop being sheep!”
…The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more the teabaggy interpretation just doesn’t quite fit. The thrill at the end, when they guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police — not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that? Why offer escape from a moral dilemma your audience doesn’t acknowledge exists?
The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police — people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.