Finding advertising more interesting...
The commercials, I’ve discovered, often originate in Jordan, which explains the predominance of Arabic actors, although they are dubbed over in Amharic. There was one interesting commercial on the CNN channel that made me snap to attention. It was for “Orascom,” the Communications Community of the Middle East. There was a succession of frames with “inspirational” shots, you know, the flower, the sun, a smile, all with captions like, “We feel…happy/ We feel old/young/fair/unfair” and here, with the “unfair” frame, there was a scene with a US soldier turning away a Muslim woman from a building, and following this, it said “But most importantly, we feel each other” and suddenly an onslaught of violent frames began: car explosions, tanks firing, Baghdad’s bombing, US supply trucks trundling across the Iraqi border, women screaming, men holding their dead children, the Iraqi flag….it was intense. And I couldn’t help but wonder, just as the Gaza situation is limping along and there seems to be some progress on the volatile Israeli-Palestine front, if we have just created a new nightmarish cycle with a similar inheritance of rage, hate, humiliation, violence, and deprivation. It’s interesting that a commercial so provocative made it to CNN world, in English, produced by a company NOT based in Iraq but expressing its solidarity with it, and in open criticism of the US.
posted by Margot @ 3:30 AM
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