HILLARY'S JUST NOT A MAC. Wondering about the HRC-Mac ad mashup, Mike writes, "How sure are we that this 1984-Hillary ad was made by an Obama "supporter"? Because when I saw it, my immediate reaction was that it was made by a winger. It's conservatives who have this Orwellian view of HRC -- they think she wants the state to control everything, she wants to take away your babies so they can be raised in state orphanages where the party line will be piped through the sound system, and so forth." I see where he's coming from, but no. To understand the ad, you have to understand...the ad. The Stalinist imagery isn't the point. The conformity is. The mute, dark colors, the stifling dress, the joyless shuffe through the workday, the stultifying exhortations on the loudspeaker. The idea of the ad was that the Mac detonates all that. Computers don't have to be an element of a dreary, dystopic work realm. They can be exciting, fun, personal, ecstatic. They can support color and icons and design and idiosyncracy. They can help us transcend the deadening effects of wage slavery, rather than acting as a tool of the managerial oppressors. This spirit, stemming from the very first Mac ad, is laced through the computer's history. Apple has never made much headway in the corporate market. They've relied, instead, on designers, artists, students, writers, and others outside the office park. When Steve Jobs came back to lead the company's ongoing resurgence, he made the electric blue iMac, began building his laptops in sliver-brushed titanium, and even, for a period, offered five different colors of computer. That's the backdrop for this ad. Or, more precisely, what the original ad was the backdrop for. And here, Hillary Clinton is the PC. She is the colorless, corporatized candidate, mouthing uninspiring platitudes, boring us with politics-as-usual. If a conservative had wanted to tag her on authoritarian grounds, the quotes chosen wouldn't have been banalities, they would have been gaffes and overreaches, ominous statements and nanny state declarations. Instead, they just placed her in the decades-old Mac-PC culture clash. They could have easily -- conceptually, I mean, not technically -- put her in this ad as the John Hodgeman character. And, frankly, the ad would actually work much better with her and Obama, rather than Hodgeman and the indie dude. --Ezra Klein
