Today is the last day of Black History month and I can't let it pass without asking why a beloved actor who once played Nelson Mandela signed-on with a dictatorship to promote its state airline?
The ad, which debuted two weeks ago during the Super Bowl and now has over 24 million views, has the actor sitting in a First Class aisle seat, a glass of water to the right of him, while he looks out a widow at the world below. Seconds before that, a piano key is struck (middle-A), then a drum beat, before French horns bubble, strings are bowed, etc.
Still looking out the window, the actor begins:
Three million years ago, there was no Africa, Asia, Americas or Europe.
Just one, big supercontinent ... [looking at the camera] Pangea.
And today there is still a force connecting those divided by distance, reversing millions of years of rifting.
Making far feel close.
Bringing there to here.
Turkish Airlines.
What is being communicated in this 46-word corporate poem, apart from encouraging air travel? That we need to get back to those good ol' pre-historic times, when places were not so much nameless but one place, a supercontinent from the late-Paleozoic?
Or if not a geological period, then its analogue: a single world government (neo-liberal? totalitarian?) enabling a single mode of production (late-capitalist? feudal? kleptocratic?), while the planet floods when it isn't on fire?
Just what is this "force connecting those divided by distance"? It can't be Turkish Airlines.
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