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Quote of the Day: Dogged
Hot Dogs
Armour Hot Dogs
What kind of kids eat Armour Hot Dogs?
Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks,
Tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox love hot dogs,
Armour Hot Dogs
The dogs kids love to bite!
Here it is, in 1967:
The comments below the YouTube video remark that such an ad could not be made today, with its fat, skinny, tough, and sissy shaming. They wonder how long it will be before it is pulled for its offensive content.
I think it might be pulled for another reason: Look at the diversity among those kids! Different races, sexes, and sizes, all getting along with each other! I thought we were bigoted back then. The presence of this ad belies the contemporary narrative.
Indeed, my own memory is of children from all sorts of backgrounds (I was raised in central California) playing together. Sure, we didn’t let the girls (except the rare talented and interested one) play HORSE or 500 or flag football. But they did play marbles with us. And nobody, nobody gave a damn what color your skin was.
I hate history being rewritten before my eyes; I have a hard enough time with my memory as it is. Famously in the original Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo shoots Greedo in the cantina before Greedo draws his weapon, and since 1997, Greedo draws first, to justify Han’s reaction (here’s the video, at 7:45). Give me a break!
A couple of weeks ago, some friends took my wife and me to see a production of Paint Your Wagon. The program notes that the original was a messy affair. Apparently this was the excuse to lade the show with politically correct sentiment and woke, tinny, and banal dialog. Our friends were angry, and justifiably so. They wanted their beloved musical; they got warmed-over Leni Riefenstahl. My wife and I shared their dismay.
The reinterpretation of history is inevitable; it’s purposeful gaslighting is unnerving and immoral. Our artifacts are being removed or used as palimpsests for propaganda. What some intend as a “brave new world” emerges as “what fresh Hell.”
What to do? My idea is to run my own version of the Benedict Option: Buy a copy of From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, and read it. This masterpiece is laden with recommendations (e.g., “The book to read is The Railway Station by L.T.C. Rolt”). Then purchase as many books from his recommendations that you can. Then hand them down to your kids. It can be your way to “snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable” (Witness by Whittaker Chambers).
Barzun’s book covers only the last 500 years, but it’s a good start to the pursuit of the past. And we should pursue our past.
And be dogged in the pursuit.
Published in General
Oscar Meyer, on the other hand, could probably still run their wiener commercial from 1965, because it shows an Alpha female bullying a cisgendered male into changing his view of being turned into a consumable meat bi-product, and forces him in the end to conform to the hive-mind mentality of the group.
But the song’s still pretty catchy….
James, your link doesn’t work for the video. FYI, I’ve found I have to go to the youtube site and copy the link directly into the post here, not into the draft of your post. Let’s see if this works . . .
Neither am I! When I’m writing a post, I do post the link into the draft, then click on it and it usually takes me to the youtube site and video. But then I have to copy and paste the link on the youtube site and directly put it here into the post. I have no idea why that works, but it does.
Oh, this is fun too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TysJVwneIxQ
Jingles work. I could sing both of those hotdog commercials from memory even though it has probably been decades since I heard either.
Anyway, a few tweeks and you could get an acceptable woke version . . .
I’m not a fan of this musical. The most famous tune is “They Call The Wind Maria,” with the last word pronounced “Ma-rye-a.” You would think that the plot synopsis would be OK in our present debauched culture:
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What could be messy about a story that includes a man selling one of his wives and two men deciding to share her? Also, including mining the town for gold dust, which undermines all the structures.
Some great music though, “Way up here they have a name for wind and rain and fire…”
C.S. Lewis has some great advice on old books:
Here’s the full essay.
Love that essay. And the most of C.S. Lewis.
Armour had a hot dog plant in Pittsburgh where I lived and had my cheese company. It was at the time said to be the largest in the world. I believe they made a million dogs a day. They had a varied distribution of other products there also with trucks delivering to local stores . I sold them Swiss Cheese.In spite of having a large volume of business they were losing 60 to 80 thousand dollars a week.. They found out that the shipping department had there own truck painted like the rest of them and had their own cash customers. Believe it or not when management found out and tried to fire the workers the union went on strike. At the time Armour was owned by the Grayhound bus company and the decided to shut the plant for good. I bought some equipment at the auction for my business. When I made a sales call earlier I was taken on a tour of the plant. It was amazing.
Amazing. A story worth telling.
Am I only one who knows about that song from the Simpsons?
I might also add, buy those problematic children’s books before they’re rewritten (or search out older editions from before the rewrites). Because there’s all sorts of “Greedo shoots first” in kid lit.
My sister-in-law got a copy of Little Black Sambo.
Ah, that’s an obvious one.
I think I recently mentioned that the dialect has disappeared in The Cricket in Times Square. Previously, all the dialogue of the old Chinese man in George Selden’s classic The Cricket in Times Square was written to reflect his accent — that is, the accent of an immigrant! (You know, the left’s preferred people.) But apparently it was just too much of a stereotype for modern publishers, and now in newer printings, the old Chinese gentleman speaks perfect English!
This kind of thing is far more subtle than just censoring Little Black Sambo.
I wonder if they’ll get around to altering the accent of the old janitors in the 40s and 50s movies and TV shows; those guys were always Swedish.
I’m old enough to remember the Sambo’s restaurant chain, which was named after its founders, not the old story. When it came to Fargo in the 70s, Sambo was an Indian kid, in full cliched raj-prince regalia.
Now you’re reminding me of the version of H. Beam Piper’s work that was put out in the 1970’s or 80’s. There was a story called “Dearest” that I had encountered before, but I noticed something odd about the new version. The retired sergeant was white-washed. The fact that “Slaughterhouse” Hampton had been in charge of a “Colored” regiment was missing. In trying to make a story written in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s politically correct, they had eviscerated the history. Here is the original. As soon as you encounter “the sergeant,” you’ll understand how he could not be allowed as a character even in the 70’s or 80’s.
Han shot first. This is the hill I’ll die on.
The annoying thing is that back in another life when I was writing curriculum for children’s literature, I had a whole lesson drawn from Cricket in Times Square on how authors will write in various dialects, and how it’s not grammatically correct, but helps readers hear what a character sounds like.
And now anyone using that curriculum is going to wonder what the heck it’s referring to, because there’s no dialect in the book at all.
Maybe the tables will turn back again, because no dialect means they’ve assimilated and the left doesn’t want that. Cultural oppression, you know.
Reason #23,219 why we homeschool.
The reasoning behind the change was sophomoric and the weird forward-backward cut designed to make it look like Han ‘dodged’ the shot by tilting his head a minute amount was poorly executed in any case.
I’ve said it before; Lucas was a gifted visionary and a crappy director.