We Are Not Miracle Whip, by David Roth

What the product means, what it has always meant, is this: we are not going to do it the way you want us to do it. You tell us to put mayonnaise on a sandwich and we tell you – in a more polite but also very forceful and very independent and youthful way – to fuck right off. It’s what our product has always been about, going back to the day that some horn-rimmed chemist invented it in a windowless room during the Eisenhower administration: Miracle Whip has always been about youth, yes, but also about rebellion. You build a box around my BLT and I smash it. And not just me. A legion of me’s, following on behind, butterknives at the ready, putting what we want on the sandwiches that are, finally, ours and ours alone. When we say, “We Are Miracle Whip,” that is what we mean. We mean fuck your sandwich box, for one thing. But we are also declaring independence. Give us mayonnaise and we will choose a slightly saltier, slightly more chemical-tasting demi-naise. And if you don’t like it – and you might not, we are ready for that that – then you will have to take it. Roll with the revolution or get rolled over it.

I know: Stephen Colbert has been over this terrain before. But despite that, and despite the fact that so many of my fellow (interesting, talented, enjoyable-to-read) FlipCollective cohorts are already moved to write by things that piss them off, I feel obligated to mention the “We Are Miracle Whip” campaign that is currently meandering unconvincingly across television screens nationwide. Your youthful-ish television commercial types, doing extreme things while – as if there had never been a Three-Legged Jeans skit on Saturday Night Live, as if young people had never made fun of anything so transcendently and blithely dorky – periodically brandishing family-size containers of Miracle Whip. Put it wherever you want, youthfuls – some government bureaucrat thinks it doesn’t go on toasted whole wheat bread? Some fucking boss somewhere doesn’t think it’s something into which one should dip a chicken drumstick? Fuck. That. Noise. Miracle Whip, which we are, is not about that.

It is about… what? It is about creating a profitable sandwich topping without wasting any actual natural substances, first and foremost. And bless it for that, I don’t begrudge anyone the right to make money off quasi-naise – whatever the market will bear and all that. The thing that strikes me first, and hardest, and most saddeningly, about the “We Are Miracle Whip” campaign is not its cravenness, exactly, or even the crudity with which its appeal is delivered. It is, rather, the way in that it provides to something far sadder; so flubby and misplaced is its call to the sandwich-spread barricades that it inadvertently contextualizes all of the ads in its type.

That talk being all the “join the revolution” ads currently rampant for iconoclastic cars and sensitive phones and patriotic beers and empowering online stock trading services and cool-but-friendly personal computers and irreverent teleconferencing systems and ironic-but-serious-when-it’s-time-to-be-serious-about-what-really-matters pants. It’s just branding, all this bullshit, but it’s also not just that.

Or not just about that. It’s about strategic falsity, of course, but no one is surprised by this from advertising, and we all know how to deal with it. What I am not necessarily as sure how to deal with is the fact that this increasingly dominant method of brand-building has not just appropriated but actually effectively subsumed and cheapened the real and important things it’s playing at. We, us, are not a lab-born sandwich spread. This is a good thing, because holy shit how gross would that be, and how would I (for instance) even be typing this. But what puzzles me is this – in a culture that tells us that we are, all of us, a spreadable pseudo-naise, what can we actually be? I don’t necessarily believe that a call to declare your independence and be yourself in the name of a better-topped sandwich or more x-treme sedan will somehow rob the TV-watching public of its ability to judge when it’s actually time to be heard or take to a specific barricade. (Although I’m willing to entertain that notion) I do think, though, that the idea of this sort of ad — that choosing to consume a particular type of consumer good effectively equates to self-definition – is bad for the brain at the very least, and a kind of slow-acting poison at the worst.

Of course I am not a sandwich spread – that’s ridiculous. I’m a human being, we are human beings, and as much as I enjoy sandwiches – more than most, I’d guess, and if this website hangs around long enough and I am lazy enough you will surely hear more on this subject – I do not think that my sandwich preferences 1) define who I am beyond a specific lunch-intensive period of time or 2) matter beyond that specific lunch-intensive period of time. They don’t. I can tell you that the type of sandwiches I enjoy, and what I enjoy on them, reflects where I grew up (New Jersey) and my parents’ condimentary absolutism (mayonnaise, basically, was for gentiles except when it was a component of Russian dressing during post-Thanksgiving meals) (there is a whole other parenthesis for ketchup but, again, I’m keeping my powder dry on the sandwich essay thing). But I won’t tell you more about my sandwich preferences here, because, really, honestly. You don’t need to hear that. My preferences are mine, and to the degree that they relate to hot peppers, they are interesting to pretty much me and whoever can or cannot put said peppers on my sandwich.

The idea that what goes on my sandwich is somehow vital – something that means something, something worth fighting for – is pretty stupid on its face. And to a certain extent this particular campaign and all of its equally chromosomally abnormal cousins – the online enticements to “Join NyQuil Nation,” the people who are somehow “friends” on social networking sites with, like, the mucus characters from those Mucinex TV ads – are eminently dismissible on those terms. And maybe I should just sort of dismiss them, but there’s something about them that provokes a reaction in me more violent than the usual well-that-was-distasteful quease after a particularly egregious advertisement. Obviously. This is like the 1,100th word of this piece.

Of course, it’d be pretty embarrassing if I got to this point in the piece and was all, “I hope someday to figure out what it is that I hate about these ads, and I will surely tell you when that day arrives.” I know it. I just don’t know quite how to express it without transgressing against the very self-policed irony codes that made these noxious bits of advertising – Brands As Social Movements, call it – both possible and popular.

My issue, in short, is this – we are supposed to laugh all this off, and I feel scoldy and overearnest in not just doing so. You don’t need to be particularly well-read on this sort of thing (which is lucky for me) to know how to respond to all this – this particular bit of savvy about advertising is learned naturally. If we’re willing to accept that the purpose of advertising – and maybe the greatest goal of corporations and brands in general over the last couple decades – is to make corporations more human, then most of the advertising we see in our day-to-day makes sense. Burger King is, finally, just selling some sad-ass meat; Bud Light a macro-brew that tastes like fart-scented seltzer. We all know this, and even those brands know it. The idea of impressing upon us something contrary to those now-evident and implicitly agreed upon truths — for instance: this limp gray flap of meat is delicious; this beer does not taste like yeasty ass-water – is well by the wayside at this point. Instead, Burger King wants you to think its hamburgers are hilarious and prankish and irreverent; Bud Light wants to be the yeasty ass-water product that Really Gets You and Never Judges You and Knows A Hilarious Joke About Women It Wants To Tell You While Your Girlfriend Is Out Of Earshot. When advertising people talk about Brand Truths, the last thing they’re not talking about how the burger tastes.

And okay, fine: advertising in its baroque period, the advertisement now just advertising itself; the product now a kind of peripheral sponsor or supporting player to the bigger idea of the product. I get it, whatever. It’s easy enough to ignore, or even to enjoy in a sort of absent way if it’s expressed with wit. It’s nothing that really deserves our attention one way or another, finally. But the Brand as Social Movement thing is different, I think.

Because here, in these (sometimes even artful) ads, we have blue jeans as the uniform of a no-bullshit kill-your-idols youth revolution and a third-tier condiment emerging as a defiant personal choice and the use of a particular non-non-drowsy cold medication as something that marks you as part of something Bigger Than Yourself. Does it work? No, of course not, of course it does not work. Watching brands try to become human is fairly harmless because it’s finally equivalent to watching a dog walk on its hind legs: futile, and almost touching in that hopeful but hardwired futility. But watching brands try the trickier task of appropriating the actual lifelong struggle of being a thinking human – defining oneself with or against the world as presently constituted; the seriousness of and very idea of choices greater than one brand (or condiment) or another; finding out who, really, you are or want to be – in the service of advancing these dumb, distracting non-answers to those real choices hits me harder, stings worse. Well-considered protest and self-definition and all that is hard enough to manage without some Humpy Irreverent Ad Dude trying to convince you that it has something to do with which light beer you drink. But more than that, it distracts from the real, really serious choices we make when we buy things.

Because, look: while buying a particular type of pants or sleep-juice-enhanced antihistamines is not important, it is still a choice. Those pants are made someplace, by someone; that particular medicine was manufactured by a company that also makes other things, that gives money which in turn influences our politics and actual lives. I don’t enlist in a social movement, one way or another, by dint of the brands I choose to consume, but that doesn’t mean that society isn’t moving, and moving at least in part based on the choices I — and every other atomized consumer looking to join some first-person-plural or Rebellious Brand Nation or whatever – make.

I don’t object to advertising that tries to make me think or feel one way or another about a product – that’s what it’s for, to convince me that I would be friends with a particular type of peanut butter or sneaker were it a person. But advertising that soothes me into feeling in the absence of thought, into believing that my ill-considered feeling (about pseudo-naise) in fact reflects a serious thought, is a different thing. If we actually believe that we are Miracle Whip, we’re fucked.