In an anxious time, ads tug at our heartstrings -- Dec. 16, 2021 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Time magazine picked Elon Musk as its 2021 Person of the Year – the individual “who most shaped the previous 12 months, for better or for worse.”

Musk, with his Tesla and SpaceX companies, emerged this year “not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society,” Time fawned. “Like it or not we are now in Musk’s world.”

Well, maybe. I’ve never ridden in a Tesla, nor do I plan to any trips into space, although I know someone who loves playing Solitaire while letting his Tesla maneuver through highway traffic.

Even if the car is amazing, I can’t imagine a Tesla exerting the emotional pull of a restored 1966 Chevy Impala convertible like the one in “Holiday Ride,” Chevrolet’s new commercial. The four-minute version is a movie unto itself about grief, love and the power of memories.

With so many of us on edge in year two of a merciless pandemic, the Chevy ad is one of several holiday commercials that tug at our heart strings and show us our humanity.

Spoiler alert – I will be telling the stories of these ads. The Chevy commercial features a grieving widower in rural America who visits the dusty, dilapidated Impala in the barn, fighting tears as he holds a photo of a smiling young woman, presumably his late wife, in happy times with the new car.

His daughter sees him putting holiday wreaths on the barn door and secretly enlists local mechanics for “night work.” They painstakingly restore the car to its former glory for a surprise reveal.

It’s “the best Christmas gift I could ever have,” dad tells daughter, and they and their dog hop in for a spin.  If you don’t tear up watching, you may have left your heart in 2020.

“Kindness, the Greatest Gift,” set to Adele’s new song “Hold On,” features the kindness of strangers during the pandemic. In this Amazon global holiday campaign ad, we see a young woman university student alone, struggling to return to near-normal life. 

In a park, an older woman neighbor, feeding birds from her palm, notices the younger woman sitting alone, seemingly downcast.

Back in her apartment, the older woman hears a news report about young people being anxious during the pandemic. She orders something on her cell phone from, of course, Amazon. The younger woman receives the surprise gift of a bird feeder and is touched by the kind gesture. The ad fades out with the two talking and sharing a park bench.

“The past 18 months have been challenging for people across the globe, including many young adults,” Ed Smith, an executive at Amazon European Union, said in a statement. “So this year, whilst the world will not be totally back to normal, opportunities for kindness and connection will take on a newfound importance.”

Another European commercial available to watch online comes from Posten, the postal service of Norway. The heartwarming, adult-themed “When Harry Met Santa” imagines brief, Christmas Eve encounters that evolve over years into a romance. The ad celebrates the 50^th anniversary in 2022 of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Norway and the postal service’s commitment to diversity.

Closer to home and more traditional is a Wegmans Food Markets broadcast ad, which features a young boy energetically and enthusiastically doing chores – raking leaves, pushing a heavy trash bin to the curb, delivering huge pots of mums, shoveling snow and putting up holiday lights.

As his family celebrates with a big holiday dinner, presumably from Wegmans, the boy dishes up a plate of food and takes it next door. Viewers realize then he has been doing the chores not for his own family but for his neighbor, an elderly woman. She comes to the door and is touched and surprised by the gift of food.

The ad is one of three in a campaign Wegmans calls “Back to Happy.” They use as a theme the children’s song, “The more we get together, the happier we’ll be.”

And, so, may we all be happier on Earth this holiday season – even if we must steer our own cars through the traffic to get together with family and friends.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A blue tide in Alabama? Senate election a big `if' -- Dec. 7, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The voters of Alabama have a chance to show Virginia wasn’t a fluke.

Last month, a Democratic wave carried Ralph Northam to victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race, washing out Republican Ed Gillespie, who had run a throw-back campaign.  

More significantly, Old Dominion voters showed the door to a passel of veteran Republican state legislators, threatening GOP control of the House of Delegates. Several delegate seats are still in doubt, pending recounts.

After the drubbing, President Donald Trump tweeted that Gillespie lost because he “did not embrace me or what I stand for,” even though Gillespie espoused Trump’s positions on immigration, Confederate monuments and other hot-button issues.

If Alabama voters reject Republican Roy Moore as their U.S. senator Tuesday, they’ll also be turning thumbs down on Trump, Moore’s protector in chief, and on the toxic politics of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.

That’s a big “if.”

No Democrat has won a statewide race in Alabama since 2008, and Trump won 63 percent of the vote last year. Much depends on whether Democrats can turn out black and independent voters for Democrat Doug Jones.

If the tide runs blue in Alabama, Trump won’t be able to blame Moore for keeping him at arm’s length. Trump has gone all-in for Moore and vice versa.

“Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need . . . Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2^nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!” Trump tweeted Monday.

A grateful Moore tweeted he “can’t wait to help” Trump drain the swamp.

If Moore loses, Trump won’t be able to erase his own failure by deleting his favorable tweets about Moore the way he did after he backed Luther Strange, Moore’s opponent in the GOP primary, and Strange lost.

A Moore loss would confirm Time’s choice of “The Silence Breakers” as its Person of the Year. The Silence Breakers is the magazine’s name for the many women who finally came forward this year to tell their stories of sexual harassment.

Among them was Leigh Corfman, who told The Washington Post that Moore touched her sexually when she was 14 and Moore was 32 and an assistant district attorney.

“Nine women have come forward to describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore, including several who say he pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has called the allegations `false’ and `malicious.’ `Specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any woman,’ he said in late November,” Time reported.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said if Moore is elected, he would “immediately have an issue with the Ethics Committee,” which could lead eventually to expulsion.

Sen. Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, said “the Senate should vote to expel him, because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”

Political expediency being what it is, though, such high-minded resolve could evaporate.

Consider what happened to Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, who had the guts to say Moore’s election would be “a stain on the GOP and the nation.”

“No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity,” Romney tweeted.

Romney’s moral stance should have earned him praise. Instead, Bannon, at a rally for Moore in Alabama, blasted Romney for failing to serve in the military and for his draft deferment for missionary work. Moore is a West Point graduate.

What Bannon failed to mention, of course, was Trump’s five draft deferments – four for education and a medical one for bone spurs in both his heels.

Voters in Alabama can tell the rest of the country they’re not buying cynical claptrap from the likes of Bannon and Trump.  

It may not happen. Late polls show Moore with a slight lead, and the race is rated a toss-up by Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter published by the University of Virginia Center for Politics.   

Still, a Democratic win in Alabama would show Virginia was not an outlier. It also would be a good omen for Democrats in next fall’s congressional elections.

Did I mention that’s a big “if”?

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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A storyteller turns preacher for math, science in digital age -- May 14, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Twenty-five years ago, a rising star at Time magazine got on a train in New York bound for Washington to hear one of his heroes give a lecture.

How quaint, I hear you saying, with 21^st century impatience. Print. Train. Hero. Lecture. Ho hum.

Not so fast. The magazine man was Walter Isaacson, then 36, who had been writing on a computer since the early 1980s, the only writer at Time doing so. Apple’s Steve Jobs would later ask him to write his biography. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Isaacson’s hero was novelist Walker Percy, chosen to deliver the 1989 Jefferson Lecture. Its sponsor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, says the lecture is “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Percy’s lecture on “The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind” was one of his last public appearances. He died a year later at 74.

Isaacson had known “Uncle Walker” – actually the uncle of a friend -- since his boyhood in New Orleans. Isaacson tried to figure out what Percy did. He had trained as a doctor and people called him Dr. Percy, but he didn’t practice medicine.

“He seemed to be at home most days, eating hog’s head cheese and sipping bourbon,” said Isaacson, who was about 9 when Percy’s first novel, “The Moviegoer,” appeared in 1961. That’s when Isaacson realized someone could make a living as a writer the way others did as an engineer or a fisherman.  “The Moviegoer” won the National Book Award, and Percy kept writing.

Percy told him two types of people come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers.

“For God’s sake, he said, be a storyteller. The world has far too many preachers,” Isaacson recalled Monday night onstage at the Kennedy Center where he delivered the 43^rd Jefferson Lecture.  

It’s heartening to know that the federal government still honors intellectual achievement – and with an old-fashioned lecture and $10,000 prize. It’s encouraging that the Concert Hall was nearly filled, although a reporter for Inside Higher Ed observed that the audience may have been slightly smaller and grayer than previously.  

That’s not surprising. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese was last year’s lecturer. Conservationist and author Wendell Berry spoke in 2012, and Harvard president and Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust was the speaker in 2011.

Isaacson, who turns 62 on May 20, is one of those achievers who make even industrious bees feel like they’ve wasted too many hours flitting around Facebook and the Food Channel.

A Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he was a political reporter, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the editor of Time. He then was chairman and CEO of CNN. He’s the author of bestselling biographies on Jobs (2011), Albert Einstein (2007) and Benjamin Franklin (2003), among others.  He’s president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies institute based in Washington.

In January 1984, Jobs lugged an original Macintosh to Time magazine to show it off. The editors called in Isaacson so they’d have one person there who actually used a computer. The two men kept in touch and in 2003, after he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs asked Isaacson to write his biography. He didn’t mention the diagnosis. Isaacson took the opportunity to tell Jobs’s story.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told Isaacson. 

“Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” 

The authorized biography was rushed into print in 2011, days after Jobs died at 56.

Isaacson titled his lecture “The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences.” Offering a rosy view of a digital future in which human creativity fuses with technology, he acknowledged he was “singing to the choir” about indispensible human imagination.

But he also challenged those who love the arts and humanities to shake off their complacency about not knowing math or appreciating science.

“Many people who extol the arts and the humanities…will proclaim without shame (and perhaps even joke) that they don’t understand math or physics. They would consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be uncultured, yet they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome,” he said.

“Trust me, our patron Thomas Jefferson and his mentor Benjamin Franklin would regard as a Philistine anyone who felt smug about not understanding math or complacent about not appreciating science,” he said.

And so the storyteller preached on the need for math and science in the digital age. My guess is that both Walker Percy and Steve Jobs would have approved.  

(c) 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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