#229 Shrimp & Circumstance

So back in the travesty which was Super Bowl Forty, when the steel curtain had stripes, there was much ballyhoo about which was the best commercial. One of the most popular was a violent commercial featuring a cave man being unfairly fired for not shipping Fed-Ex even though Fed-Ex wasn’t invented yet it. It then showed the cave man exiting the cave in frustration, kicking a small dinosaur, and getting stomped flat by a giant dinosaur foot. Perhaps Matt Hasselbeck et al should have noticed, the giant stomping dinosaur leg was striped like a zebra. There was a message there. Try as you might, circumstance is your enemy.
I did see the commercial I hated the worst, and it was about shrimp—jumbo shrimp to be exact. Speaking of which, I saw a guy with one of those new widescreen laptops. When he unfolded it at the coffee shop wifi stop, I couldn’t believe how big the screen was. And it kind of made me wonder, like the name jumbo shrimp, is there something oxymoronic about a big screen laptop? It’s like having a carryon bag with wheels. Bigger is nice, but if something was invented for portability, shouldn’t it be, um, smaller?
So anyhow, the commercial in question was about big shrimp— specifically, animated talking big shrimp that, even though they were in a shrimp shape, acted and talked like people. The term is anthropomorphism. We act as if non-human things and animals are human and respond to them as such. When a dog curls his lips in a certain way we say he is smiling. Even if it’s just gas. The danger with anthropomorphism is we generalize all human attributes from a few. If it’s walking and talking, it should be loving and caring, and be bound by the same moral constraints as other humans. And constraints of taste. So the commercial features the husband shrimp offering some popcorn from Dairy Queen to the wife shrimp. They both eat some and then the wife shrimp says: “Something tastes weird. Is this popcorn or popcorn shrimp?” They both react in horror, having apparently just eaten their fellow beings. Then the wife says, “Where are the kids?” And they scream in horror again. Ha. Ha. First off, I’m guessing I will never eat popcorn shrimp again. Maybe I’m too squeamish but really, is it a good idea to sell a product by bringing up the idea of eating your own children? Cannibalism is bad enough. Hannibal Lechter aside, most people find themselves utterly repulsed by the notion of eating a fellow human being. But to take that one step further and introduce the idea of cannibalizing your own offspring...
Anthropomorphism is a double edged sword, cute can get gruesome in the time it takes to skin a cat. Or a seahawk.
America, ya gotta love it.