Absolut Reconquista

On the Dallas Morning News blog the other day, I posted an image of a new Absolut Vodka ad running in Mexico, that shows about half the western United States back in Mexican hands. The caption: "In an Absolut world" -- meaning, in a perfect world, Mexico would still control what it used to in the US.

My comment was simply that I've always preferred Grey Goose vodka myself.

A big back-and-forth ensued in the comboxes over whether or not Absolut should be boycotted, whether yanquis were overreacting, etc. Whichever side you come down on, there are a couple of lessons in this.

For one, there's no such thing as ads that stay confined to one country, not with the Internet. Pre-Internet, this ad would have only been seen by Mexicans, its intended market. Absolut wouldn't have had to have worried about offending Americans. Not anymore.

Secondly, the reason this ad offends some Americans is more or less the same reason it is attractive to some Mexicans: a sense of grievance and anxiety over territory. If this ad had run 40 years ago, Americans would have been able to laugh it off. Not so much anymore, not with illegal immigration and the Mexification of much of the US Southwest -- which, as the ad indicates, was historically part of Mexico. The ad plays to crude nationalism, but in the Internet era, that can cut both ways. An ad for the Mexican market that depends in some sense on putative Mexican customers' latent hostility to the United States to sell them stuff inevitably will harm the same product's image in the United States, because it associates the brand negatively with American customers' fears.

And: it's easy to laugh at those fears if you aren't living in the Southwest.

Daniel Larison reflects on how cultural symbols and the anxieties attending them, matters that look silly to outsiders, look very different to people whose emotions and imaginations are engaged by the controversies those symbols (e.g., a vodka ad playing to Mexican nationalism and anti-Americanism) represent. Here he links the ad controversy to the current dispute over the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, whose name is hotly resented by the Greeks:

This reminds me of a recent discussion I was having about Greece and FYROM. Someone said that Westerners probably find Balkan disputes about names and ancient territorial claims to be “petty.” This is probably true, but it is mostly a function of not understanding the history behind the controversy. Had Greeks not waged the Macedonian Struggle in one form or another for the better part of seventy years, the dispute over what to call the former Yugoslav republic would probably have been resolved, but because of the explicitly irredentist and separatist aspects of “Macedonian” identity over the last century it is very difficult for many Greeks to accept Skopje’s claim to the name. In that conversation, I noted that we have our own controversies about “merely” symbolic things as well. Of course, people tend to call them “merely” symbolic when the symbols belong to someone else and they don’t understand the significance of the symbols, especially not at a visceral level.

Now would be a good time for a vodka martini, n'est-ce pas? Viva Grey Goose!

UPDATE: Absolut has apologized.