There’s nothing wrong with the ad, if interpreted as most people saw it — recent immigrants praising America in their own native languages. Only in the context of today’s multi-culti cult is the ad problematic, so it’s the cult that’s the problem, not the ad.
We have a long history of new immigrants singing praise of their adopted homeland in their native tongues. As late as 1943, the Educational Alliance was circulating a Yiddish translation of the “Star-Spangled Banner” to honor the 100th anniversary of the death of Francis Scott Key. Earlier in the century, Jews wrote patriotic music in Yiddish: “Long Live America,” “Long Live the Land of the Free,” and “Washington und Lincoln und Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses, our Teacher),” which must have involved a fair amount of cultural as well as linguistic translation.
All this happened while their kids were learning English and enlisting to fight in both World Wars. Even before WWI, in 1910, we have, “It’s tough when Izzy Rosenstein loves Genevieve Malone,” although actual intermarriage wouldn’t reach epidemic proportions for another 70 years.
New immigrants have always had questions about their loyalty — but I think it’s fair to say that writing patriotic songs in their native tongues, and translating traditional American ones, isn’t the source of those suspicions.
What conservatives were reacting against are the sentiments in this Facebook posting from a friend of mine who’s a political science professor at a major Midwestern state university:
As the child and grandchild of immigrants, who worked to make a place for themselves in this country *and* who spent considerable resources on my education so that I would be able to fluently speak the language they spoke when they arrived here, I absolutely cannot figure out why this commercial or the idea of multiculturalism has so unhinged so many people. This desperate drive to make “America” or “Americans” into a single thing that matches one’s own personal experience seems so futile, such a waste of time and energy.
It encapsulates pretty much everything that’s wrong with the cult of multi-culti and the way it’s been sold to several generations of Americans. (By the way, this is also from a guy who has, as near as I can tell, made little-to-no genuine effort to understand the large swath of his own fellow Americans who love and care about guns, so I guess cultural relativism has its limits.)
Those who see assimilation as a sine qua non of a functioning society made up of immigrants don’t futilely want to make America (sans scare quotes) into “one single thing.” They understand America as a broad umbrella that can contain a wide variety of differences.
What they object to is the idealization of the countries of origin, which inevitably balkanizes the country, and short-circuits the adoption of the American idea by new immigrants.
Those who object to the Coke ad see it in terms of a cultural elite that seems determined to drag the rest of the country along with it down a road of cultural cowardice and American unexceptionalism. That’s a fair assessment of multiculturalism, but wildly over-interprets the ad.
They also reject the self-evidently false assertion that all cultures are equally valid on their own terms, which brings me to the other, far more objectionable ad of the evening.
) like the one Maedar says it seems a bit extreme. In Britain our consenting age is 16, same age as it is to marry (with parents' permission). Many young teenagers (14-16) have older girl/boyfriends, but they are both consenting. Even though it is an offense to have intercourse under the age of 16 I haven't heard of any prosecution for young teenagers (when both are under 16).