Farmers: Iconic Propaganda

            Farmers are American icons of hard working individuals. They invest long, strenuous hours into the fields and crops to reap a rich benefit at harvest. The advertisement patronized farmers as these great icons of history by using the black and white color scheme at times. The narrators voice pronounced the characters with the upmost of respect. He constantly referred to the farmers as creations of God necessary to fulfill duties they were designed for. Each situation described another sad, painful, or admirable task farmers had to deal with.

Most view this lost trade as the root of modern industry. The technological advancements we’ve achieved have become the harvest of the hard working farmers that invested time and effort into the nation at its youth. Tools and machinery have replaced the work that was once required of them. This is evidently seen as the narrator takes the viewer through a photographic journey of the evolution of farming. Dodge affectively used this advertisement to try and sell their truck.

            The second video made a mockery of the first from start to finish. This was immediately evident by the tone of voice of the narrator. He sounded very nerdy and sarcastic. This video satirized the technological advancements that man actually made as God’s newer creation to fix the errors left by the previous method. Basically, the second video exposed all of the rhetorical persuasion techniques used in the first video for what they really were: advertising propaganda.

            The main advertisement line of the first video read “To the farmer in all of us”. This associated the farmers with the viewer by appealing to a sense of American pride. The second video changed this line to “Here’s to shameless heartland pandering”. The infinitive ‘to pander’ means furnishing a client for prostitution or profiting from the weakness of another. Basically, the second video is claiming that Dodge is heartlessly using an American icon for profit by forcing unwilling feelings. That almost sounds like molestation the way it is worded, which is obviously and successfully exaggerated for effect. The video also mocked the ability of the company and, indirectly, the truck by mentioning their approach of bankruptcy due to poor management. My favorite line was the parenthesis after the dodge ram logo that read “(we got subsidized by taxpayers too)”. This line crossed the moral issue line and stepped into social issue territory. Here is one thing most people would not associate farmers and Dodge with: government payoffs.