The world needs to be less high-strung - Denny Scott editorial

This column started, as many of them do, with research for our weekly editorial board meeting, the fruits of which you can read on the opposite page (page 4 of the print edition of The Citizen, for those of you reading online). Every week I try to come to the table with some balanced issues to discuss and, every week, I end up cutting a number of them before I present my list to the rest of the board. Some are cut because, as I’ve written before, I’m closer to the centre of the political spectrum than other members of the board and our goal is to find subjects and stances we can all agree on. Others, however, I cut because I just don’t see us spending the ink on them in what is supposed to be a refreshing look at common issues.

 

This column focuses on something that wasn’t necessarily the centre of the political aisle, but was just a little too silly to grace a space that often deals with serious issues.

 

Last week, the president of the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra, Ken MacLeod, made a one-minute-long tongue-in-cheek response to an advertisement from auto manufacturer Infiniti. The car company showed one of its vehicles in the middle of a concert hall, with two people in the car taking in what could be generously described as a middling rendition of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra by a youth orchestra.

 

The people in the SUV tune out the off-key performance by putting up the windows and making use of the massaging seats in the vehicle. The key takeaway was how quiet and comfortable the vehicle could be, regardless of the cacophony outside of it.
The commercial was, as far as car commercials go, pretty middling in itself. I’m sure the idea has been done dozens of times, maybe even with bad music. In the end, it’s an effort that likely went unnoticed by most and would soon be forgotten by the rest.

 

MacLeod took exception to the commercial, saying, as the leader of a talented band of young musicians, it struck a sour note with him.

 

He said, despite the fact that the commercial was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, the “tired old stereotype of youth and bad music” was frustrating and something he felt he needed to refute.

 

His response includes his own band of talented musicians playing the exact same tune, and doing a much better job of it.
While MacLeod’s video was interesting and funny, the fact that he made it frustrated me, which is what I was going to bring up to the editorial board.

 

While MacLeod’s effort could be seen as laudable, I couldn’t help but draw a connection to it and the “slap heard around the world” from the Oscars.

 

In case you’ve been living under a rock, which itself was under a larger rock, which was at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and your WiFi was out, earlier this month at the prestigious award show, long-time successful actor Will Smith said and did some pretty heinous things in response to presenter Chris Rock making a (bad) joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith (Smith’s possibly soon-to-be ex-wife).

 

Rock made a joke about Pinkett-Smith’s baldness, which she says is connected to a medical condition Rock says he didn’t know about (of course, if you believe the tabloids out of India, he did know because he was having an affair with her). It was a bad joke, and it was in poor taste, but like many other bad jokes in poor taste told at award ceremonies, it likely would’ve been forgotten in a week.

 

Smith, however, made sure that everyone would remember the joke by storming the stage, slapping Rock and then yelling some pretty crass curse words at the presenter… twice.

 

Instead of it being a flash-in-the-pan incident, Smith made sure people will be talking about the joke for years (and it will likely see a resurgence in a decade when Smith’s ban from the awards show is lifted).

 

MacLeod has done the same thing - instead of having this middling commercial fly under the radar, he has made sure that people will seek it out and, if the commercial is at all effective, those same people might think about buying an Infiniti when it comes time to replace their car.

 

He spoke on national newscasts about the commercial and his video response, making sure that, aside from getting thousands of hits for his own video on the internet, Canadians from coast to coast would know about the commercial.

 

Both incidents are reminiscent of a lesson my father taught me at the rink: the referee may not see the first penalty, but the retaliation is always caught. People need to remember that, by overreacting, they are only going to make matters worse.