No longer on Fox News at the 5 o’clock hour, it’s easier to ignore Glenn Beck’s wacky ramblings now, but that’s not as much fun. Today he rallied his die-hard Internet show subscribers against blue jeans, announcing a boycott of Levi’s because their new ad campaign “glorifies revolution.” The “Go Forth” 60-second spot combines quick cuts of good-looking people swimming and protesting over a reading of a Charles Bukowski poem that implores, “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.” Beck is appalled at the “progressivism.”
“It’s hard to believe that a company associated with America and working-class values would use global revolutions and progressivism to sell their products, but that’s exactly what Levi’s is doing in their new commercials,” Beck claims.
There’s no actual violence in the commercial (see below), just a lot of thin, young people getting wet, playing rock and roll, and making out. Even the few quick shots of protesters and police, which Levi’s says were filmed before the August riots in London, look like pretty peaceful gatherings. (Isn’t Beck a fan of those?) Levi’s contends that the ad promotes “positive action” and “optimism.”
Beck, though, has always had a complicated relationship with so-called “revolutions,” content to allude to the idea of them and encourage his followers to “water the tree of liberty,” while simultaneously insisting it’s the left that “wants a violent revolution.”
But low-rise skinnies? Simply un-American.
Glenn Beck: I’m boycotting Levi’s because of their ‘Go Forth’ ad that ‘glorifies revolution’ [NYDN]
