The other night on television I saw a commercial for Windex, the window-cleaning product. In it, two birds were exclaiming about what an excellent job Windex does. It makes windows so clean, the birds said, that birds cannot see the glass, and fly into it, hurting themselves. Don't buy Windex, the birds told us. Let your windows be dirty. Windex is bad for birds.

Obviously, the ad is playing cute with the message delivered by the birds, one of which wore a bandage, supposedly covering a window-related injury.

The Windex folks cynically and harmfully are using the injured-bird story as a way to show you, the consumer, that their product does an incredible job. It cleans windows so well they become invisible. My interpretation: birds be damned, buy our product.

There is a second ad in which a woman dressed as a scientist (white lab coat) tells viewers to ignore the ad supposedly created by birds, the ad telling you that dirty windows are better. Clean windows are better, she says, and Windex is the product for you.

Not for me. Advertising often is crass and stupid. These take top prize. The manufacturers of Windex and its ad agency should be ashamed of making light of the millions of bird deaths caused each year by collisions with windows.

(These two commercials are part of a long-running series of ads in which two birds, generally resembling magpies, help sell Windex. Other commercials in the series avoid disdain for birds. One, in which the birds trick a man into walking nose-first into his very clean glass patio doors, actually is funny. The newest in the series, though, is not funny. Windex is manufactured by the S. C. Johnson company. The ads were created by the agency Grey Worldwide.)