Monday night Carrie and I tossed in the towel on cooking at home and took a break instead.
We’ve lived near Granary Square for some 38 years now. Well, maybe only 34 years, because when we got here, the onion fields were here first. And before that, a Tataviam Indian village? And before that? Woolly mammoths? Saber-toothed tigers?
So much for legacy.
But this column is exactly about legacy. More on that in a moment.
So, we headed over to the new Japanese spot for tempura and sushi. Nice to have a non-chain-owned restaurant nearby. And big screens for the Dodgers game, where they won their fifth in a row. Should they again win the World Series, now that’s a well-earned legacy.
We’re dipping our tempura into a savory sauce when a Coors beer ad pops up.
Western-style commercial. Strong-looking man with a perfectly cut manosphere beard and perfect cowboy hat. He’s got a ranch, a nice porch and a rustic Western chair where he slowly sits down, looks out over his vast spread, reaches for a Coors and pops it open.
I’m feeling Marlboro Man vibes, but we made cowboys selling cigarettes illegal decades ago. Cigs, no dice. Booze, bring it on.
So faux Marlboro Man opens his Coors, and just to the right, in bold cowboy letters, appears:
COORS. START YOUR LEGACY.
And the entire screen fades into a golden, bubbly, 72-inch ocean of deliciously inviting Coors beer.
“Start Your Legacy.”
Apparently, I had this legacy thing all wrong. I thought your legacy involved what you built, who you helped, the family you raised and the things you left behind.
What? I worked my ass off for 70 years when I could have just popped the top of a Coors?
My dad had a beer legacy, and his wasn’t anything like this Coors Marlboro Man guy. Alcoholism, terrorized kids and a broken family. That’s a tragic legacy that still endures.
We need to be careful about nurturing our legacies.
Ironically, immediately after this stunning revelation came an ad for a hyper-masculine supplement called Total-T2, featuring a solidly built, 50-ish, perfect, apparently retired-NFL kind of guy.
He showed all kinds of worn-out, tired-looking older guys like me struggling to stay awake watching a game on TV and barely able to get out of a chair at the beach to dip a toe in the water.
But with Total-T2, these guys are transported into a new reality. Suddenly they’re energetic. Strong. Virile. Buff. Ready to take on the world. They look like Coors guy.
And all for the price of a bottle of pills.
So why do I have that weight machine upstairs? Why do I ride my bike incessantly? Why does every doctor on the planet tell you that as you age, you have to work harder to stay vibrant and strong?
But ex-NFL guy tells me the answer is in a pill.
You can’t avoid the incessant truck commercials. Be a Ford guy. A Chevy guy. A Ram guy. A man ain’t a man unless he’s got a five-day beard and a buffed-up pickup looking like it OD’d on Total-T2.
Start Your Legacy. Reclaim Your Manhood. Be Ram Tough.
Oh, how we’re bombarded with slogans.
And here’s the rub: The Madison Avenue marketing types don’t sell us products anymore:
They sell us what we’re afraid we’re not.
Start a legacy. Drink beer.
Reclaim your manhood. Take a pill.
Be tough. Drive a truck.
And then comes the biggest sales slogan of our time.
Make America Great Again.
It solves everything, absolutely.
We shouldn’t be surprised that political marketing works exactly like product marketing. We’ve been trained for it our entire lives.
George H.W. Bush gave us “a thousand points of light.” Barack Obama gave us “Yes We Can.” George W. Bush spoke beneath a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner that, as the Iraq War staggered on, aged about as well as a 20-year beer belly.
Then showman Trump gave us the most recognizable political slogan of our time:
“Make America Great Again.”
Four words.
Selling what we’re afraid we’re not.
Sell the feeling.
Make America Great Again.
Manly. Tough.
And now we’ve engaged our closest neighbor and one of our largest trading partners, Canada, in an escalating trade war. Trump even posted an image Sunday depicting himself in a USA hockey jersey standing over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, sprawled on the ice.
“Get up, Governor,” the image says.
Canada answered somewhat less photogenically. With matching retaliatory tariffs of its own.
Eventually the image in the commercial, the promise of the slogan, all the waving flags and the cartoonish imagining of Canada’s prime minister give way to reality.
If drinking Coors is your plan for legacy, wait 20 years and see how that works out. If pills are your path to muscle, one year later you’ll see the same frumpy guy in the mirror.
The monster truck makes parking at Costco a bear.
And nations ultimately face the consequences of their hyped slogans as well.
That’s the thing about building real legacies. It’s not what a commercial promises or what a slogan sells.
Legacy is what you leave behind when reality inevitably takes hold and bites down hard.
Gary Horton is chairman of the College of the Canyons Foundation board. His “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.
