Truly Desperate Times

Leave it to Christmas to clarify our modern angst.

Well, the commercials, anyway.

Last year it was Peloton and the husband gifting his wife the perfect present to keep her a Stepford wife. This year it’s Lincoln’s series of ads featuring a woman coming home to all kinds of mayhem that so shocks and depresses her, that she retreats to her SUV.

Her luxury Lincoln Aviator SUV.

(This is an aside, but exactly why is it called an aviator? According to those in the know, dictionaries and the like, an aviator is a person who flies an aircraft. Since it’s neither a person or an aircraft… I had to ask, inquiring minds. But to get back to what’s important…)

This is all quite disturbing.

If a woman living in a fine house, with two lovely children and a wonderful husband–not to mention the luxury Lincoln Aviator SUV–is so weary that such circumstances are too much for her to bear, how can the rest of us who are not so fortunate, certainly materially, ever manage? And the circumstances she finds so depressing? Kids being kids. Parents doing yoga during their visit. The kids enjoying their blow up play area. Dad playing with the kids and their Christmas gifts in the house.

I mean “wow”, right?

If I had to come home to that, why I’d retreat to my spacious luxo-boat too. With its sumptuous heated leather seats that stretch out, the hi-fi stereo sound enveloping you as you’re insulated from the desperation just beyond the sheet metal, why would anyone want to be anywhere else? And starting at “only” 51K and up (84K shown).

A bargain is such desperate times.

Now, it’s possible that a few wags out there will not be particularly touched that this privileged white woman, living the proverbial American dream, is worthy of our sympathies, or deserving of our empathy. After all, there far more people, many of them less privileged single mothers, struggling to just get by. But maybe, just maybe, this is a searing indictment of our runaway pressure-packed culture so demanding that even someone like this picture-perfect embodiment of the feminine ideal is too overwhelmed to deal with it.

And aren’t we all feeling just a bit overwhelmed these days.

The good folks at Lincoln are here to help.