ad nauseum

sam elliott won't rest until every glacier melts and every polar bear is dead.

why else would he continue to pimp the biggest gas-sucking bunny-crushing truck-beasts american engineers can design? okay, besides the money.

sam elliott has a great, iconic voice. shoot, if he told me something ridiculous, like say, coors ("the banquet beer!") is fit for human consumption, i'd almost believe him. it is, after all, brewed with high country barley and pure rocky mountain spring water. which sounds good, in the abstract, if not in the actual beer.

but when he tells me the dodge ram 1500 truck can "move heaven and earth," and "bring the world to its knees" ~ while on screen a CG mountain explodes in a cataclysm of environmental devastation ~ i start to think maybe sam isn't the most credible, responsible spokesperson.

give the soulless marketing hacks at dodge credit ~ they know their target market. the dog-whistle language in this spot is like PBR for gun-toting climate-change-denying manifest-destinating hemi-hogs.

"take it all head-on ... shorten the distances, push beyond the possible, roar past convention, shift every course, defy the elements..."

earth-scorching parody can't mock much much harder than that. and yet, it's just the kind of talk that gets the most atherosclerotic viagra-dependent face-painters all tingly with...something. they can't quite remember what. simmer down there, bubba. you're just a few systolic points away from a hemorrhagic event.

sam, though, takes it one step further. he actually appears on camera here ~ a first in this scintillating series ~ lending his personal imprimatur to a marauding message of manly plunder.

"the road doesn't end here," sam says. "this is only the beginning. guts. glory. ram."

and with those last three words, delivered with the dramatic seriosity only a true professional can fake, excitable types all over the country explode, messily and in unison, in a truckgasm of monster proportions.

atta way, sam. environmental impact, if such a thing existed at all, is somebody else's problem. america's weekday warriors are gonna ram this road right up mother nature's avenue ~ and god help anyone who gets in the way. all the way to the job site where the really serious fracking happens. giddy. up.

afterward they'll fire up some of the beef council's finest byproduct, because as sam once intoned: "beef ~ it's what's for dinner. especially after you've just had your way with nature and you're ready to reload with a bolus of fat-marbled protein, rammed into your veins. defy doctors orders. guts. glory. meat."

three things ~ the economy, the environment, and the american habitus ~ are in rough shape. sam elliott's audacious advocacy ~ for fat trucks burning tons of fossil fuels and a flotilla of adipose americans ~ is ill-advised. in a nonfunny literal kind of way.

sam, the world is already pretty well brought to its knees, thanks. and you've done your bit to help put it there. so before you start pimping, oh-i-don't-know, high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified organisms and baby harp seal hunting ~ how about you take a ram 1500 head-on and, you know, push beyond the possible?