The upside of watching streaming services: fewer commercials. I don't miss them. I do not watch broadcast news, so I don't see the ads for drugs like Rungforu ("Ask your doctor if Rungforu is right for you. Side effects may include dissolving, sudden lack of skin, desire to play the oboe.")
The football commercials fall into a few tidy genres: bro-moments centered around consumption of protein and carbohydrates. Here is a grain-based liquid that intoxicates incrementally; here is a round bread-based foodstuff in which cheese has been ingeniously injected into its perimeter.
Then there are the car ads. Usually it's a couple enjoying an emotional car-based life experience. But last week I saw the squeegee ad, and it makes me fear for the moral quality of the nation.
We see a young guy at a gas station, wiping his windshield with the wand. You know what I mean: the sponge-on-a-stick you find leaning with weary defeat in the corner of a bucket of blue poison. The manager of the gas station comes around the corner, smiling.
"Hey, there," he says. "You gettin' some gas?"
"Ah, just using your squeegee," the driver says. He is not getting any gas because he has a vehicle that uses electricity.
The manager, still smiling but cautious because he doesn't know if this violation of the social contract means the guy is also a violent sociopath, says, "Well, if you squeegee, it kinda comes with the gas."
The volt-dolt is surprised: "Squeegee isn't free?" Oh, yes, of course it's free, we get the fluid from a spring out back. But the manager, attempting to instruct the arrogant little tapeworm on the interlocking assumptions that make up human society, says, "It's free ... with gas."
Whereupon the driver announces that his vehicle doesn't need gas. So apparently he is freed from any obligation and could wash down his entire vehicle with fluid — what we call a redneck car wash — and drive away, thinking "suckers."
Everyone else pumping gas is surprised: No gas, no squeegee? Next you'll tell me I can't put the samples at the grocery store into a bag to eat later. The guy sighs, and buys 86 cents of gas, then says, "Now squeegee?" The manager, tamping down the sudden desire to plunge a shiv into the guy's rear tire, sighs in defeat. "Now squeegee."
Eighty. Six. Cents. Total station profit right there: about a penny and a half. We're supposed to take away the vehicle's stingy fuel needs, but the impression you get is that the target market for the Hyundai Santa Fe hybrid are entitled jerks who can afford a $39,000 vehicle but feel as if the world owes them unlimited windshield-cleaning fluid whenever, wherever.
Hyundai thought we would side with the smug driver instead of the harried working guy who's probably been at the station since 4 a.m. covering for someone who was sick, and he's had to run the register while trying to stock the cooler and deal with angry people because the lottery terminal was down, and a hundred other things.
Hyundai was wrong. The YouTube comments on the ad are overwhelmingly scornful of the Hyundai owner, because we still have the moral character to recognize what's right.
If everyone used the stuff without buying gas, it wouldn't be there anymore.
Why, yes, my father did own a gas station. Why do you ask?
james.lileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • Twitter: @Lileks • facebook.com/james.lileks
