[Rashad, also known as the Cackler, is an old homeless man who has wandered North America for decades and is notorious for his stream of diatribes on a wide range of subjects.]
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Where to begin when the folly and madness are everywhere?
The other day I saw this Coke commercial. Ever notice how on TV they’re always drinking Coke out of glass bottles, never out of cheap-looking plastic ones or tin cans—which are the only ones you can find in the real world? When was the last time you saw a glass Coca Cola bottle outside of a commercial? They get those glass bottles from the 1950s with a time machine, from when doctors told kids that smoking cigarettes makes you as healthy as Hercules. Back then the saintly medical doctor advised mothers, “When you pack your kid’s lunch, don’t forget to add the box of smokes right between the apple and the ham sandwich.”
But I’d like to know why the actors that are paid to look orgasmic from drinking sugar water on TV aren’t as celebrated as those that win Academy awards for their movies. Which kind of acting takes more skill, acting ordinary in an Oscar-bait drama or gaslighting the audience into normalizing corporate weirdness?
Coca-Cola is weird as fuck. The soft drink is chemically engineered to fuck us over. It’s “soft” because it’s not as hard as alcohol. Alcohol is hard and sugar is soft, I guess, because alcohol puts you to sleep when you drink too much, so you smack your face on the floor, but sugar makes your ass or belly soft and flabby.
The Coke Company, though, has an army of predatory engineers that look over every aspect of their product, and all they’re asking is whether their witch’s brew is sufficiently diabolical. Besides sugar, Coke is filled with sweeteners like Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Neotame, and other wicked unnatural shit they extracted from the remnants of a comet that visited us from another galaxy. Why add just one sweetener when you can whip up fifty?
In the ads, Coke is served in glass bottles to make the drink look as precious as wine—even though Coke is shit-hued brown; their slogan, “Coke is it” does us the service of reminding us subliminally that Coke is shit. Coke is made from toxic garbage and like the dump you take that wreaks the bathroom for hours, even the Coke ads steer clear of their product.
If Coke is it, what exactly is it? It is anything you want it to be. That’s why the ads sell everything under the sun except the sugar water. Coca Cola itself is just shit, but we’re encouraged to imagine that shit can be happiness or helping your neighbour or peace on Earth. But they never sell the drink itself. How could they? The drink is essentially shit.
Forget smearing lipstick on a pig. What if the Coke salesman had to be honest about what he’s selling us? There’s a knock at your door and 1949’s Willy Loman is standing on your doorstep. He’s stuffed a steaming turd into a glistening glass bottle. He tells you to guzzle the stinking, wretched filth because it’s not shit, after all. The turd is only it—not shit, but Joy and Friendship and Progress and God Almighty. Worship Coke because Coke is everywhere and it’s shit, and shit is what we deserve because God is dead and we killed him.
How did we get addicted to shit? If our brain’s pleasure center can be so easily exploited, how can any of our judgments be trusted? Is it possible we could be wrong about practically everything?
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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Coca-Cola_Pavillon._Expo_2015.jpg
By Photones [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons